Pronouncing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking

Tree, Jean Fox

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(96)00781-0

Cited by 168 publications

(122 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…According to Clark and Fox Tree (2002), speakers utter particular disfluencies in order to inform the listener, for example, about the length of an anticipated interruption to speech (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002;Fox Tree & Clark, 1997). In line with this view, investigations based on corpora of transcribed speech show that thee is followed by silence more often than thuh (Fox Tree & Clark, 1997) and that longer silences follow um than uh (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002), consistent with earlier speech comprehension findings that suggest that uh and um have different effects on listeners (Fox Tree, 2001).…”

supporting

confidence: 68%

“…In line with this view, investigations based on corpora of transcribed speech show that thee is followed by silence more often than thuh (Fox Tree & Clark, 1997) and that longer silences follow um than uh (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002), consistent with earlier speech comprehension findings that suggest that uh and um have different effects on listeners (Fox Tree, 2001). Although this view has been challenged (O'Connell & Kowal, 2005), evidence from recorded speech that is consistent with Clark and Fox Tree's findings has been reported elsewhere (e.g., Barr, 2001;Fox Tree, 2001).…”

mentioning

confidence: 86%

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Disfluency in dialogue: an intentional signal from the speaker?

Finlayson

Corley

2012

Psychon Bull Rev

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Disfluency is a characteristic feature of spontaneous human speech, commonly seen as a consequence of problems with production. However, the question remains open as to why speakers are disfluent: Is it a mechanical byproduct of planning difficulty, or do speakers use disfluency in dialogue to manage listeners' expectations? To address this question, we present two experiments investigating the production of disfluency in monologue and dialogue situations. Dialogue affected the linguistic choices made by participants, who aligned on referring expressions by choosing less frequent names for ambiguous images where those names had previously been mentioned. However, participants were no more disfluent in dialogue than in monologue situations, and the distribution of types of disfluency used remained constant. Our evidence rules out at least a straightforward interpretation of the view that disfluencies are an intentional signal in dialogue.

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supporting

confidence: 68%

mentioning

confidence: 86%

Disfluency in dialogue: an intentional signal from the speaker?

Finlayson

Corley

2012

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…Availability -or, ease of production of upcoming material -is known to aff ect sentence planning (Bock & Warren, 1985 ;Branigan et al, 2008 ;Brown-Schmidt & Konopka, 2008 ;Ferreira, 1996 ;Ferreira & Dell, 2000 ;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000 ). For example, when upcoming material is not available for production, speakers are more likely to lengthen preceding words (Fox Tree & Clark, 1997 ) or insert additional words (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002 ), including optional function words, such as optional that in English complement or relative clauses (Ferreira & Dell, 2000 ;Roland et al, 2006 ). Specifi cally, there is evidence that speakers are less likely to produce that if an object relative clause starts with a defi nite NP, compared to an indefi nite NP (Elsness, 1984 ;Jaeger & Wasow, 2006 ;Tottie, 1995 previous mention (Prince, 1981 ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

Norcliffe

Jaeger

2014

Lang. cogn.

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a b st r a c t Recent proposals hold that the cognitive systems underlying language production exhibit computational properties that facilitate communicative effi ciency, i.e., an effi cient trade-off between production ease and robust information transmission. We contribute to the cross-linguistic evaluation of the communicative effi ciency hypothesis by investigating speakers' preferences in the production of a typologically rare head-marking alternation that occurs in relative clause constructions in Yucatec Maya. In a sentence recall study, we fi nd that speakers of Yucatec Maya prefer to use reduced forms of relative clause verbs when the relative clause is more contextually expected. This result is consistent with communicative effi ciency and thus supports its typological generalizability. We compare[ * ] We thank Serapio Canul Dzib for Yucatec Maya language consulting and for assistance in preparing, translating, and recording experimental stimuli; Marcelina Chan, Miguel Sosoya, José Cipriano Dzib Uitzil, and Lorena Pool Balam for transcribing the Yucatec data; Andrew Watts for programming assistance; and Juergen Bohnemeyer for sharing his knowledge of and insights into Yucatec grammar with us. We are also very grateful to Mtra. Leyla Gisela Leo Peraza and Ddra. Graciela Cortés Camarillo at the Universidad de Oriente (UNO), for their offi cial support of the project, and to Betsy Kraft and Marta Beatriz Poot Nahuat for their invaluable assistance with participant recruiting and administration. Finally, our thanks to all the students at the UNO who took part in our experiment. This work was partially funded through National Science Foundation grants BCS-0848353 and CAREER IIS-1150028 to TFJ. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect those of the National Science Foundation. Address for correspondence: Elisabeth Norcliff e, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. e-mail: elisabeth.norcliff e@mpi.nl nor cliffe and jaeger 168 two types of cue to the presence of a relative clause, pragmatic cues previously investigated in other languages and a highly predictive morphosyntactic cue specifi c to Yucatec. We fi nd that Yucatec speakers' preferences for a reduced verb form are primarily conditioned on the more informative cue. This demonstrates the role of both general principles of language production and their language-specifi c realizations.

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“…Previous research on the phonetics of self-repair has focused mainly on the various types of disfluency associated with the identification of a reparandum and the 'initiation' of repair, such as the lengthening of pre-repair segments (Fox Tree andClark 1997, Shriberg 2001) or the abrupt, often glottally reinforced 'cut-off' of pre-repair lexical items (Jasperson 2002, Benkenstein andSimpson 2003). This study rather focuses on the phonetic characteristics of the repair proper -in particular as compared with those of the reparandum.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic reduction and informational redundancy in self-initiated self-repair in Dutch

Plug

2011

Journal of Phonetics

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Pronouncing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking

Cited by 168 publications

References 13 publications

Disfluency in dialogue: an intentional signal from the speaker?

Disfluency in dialogue: an intentional signal from the speaker?

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

Phonetic reduction and informational redundancy in self-initiated self-repair in Dutch

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