Morphology and Phonology
Filled pauses
Filled pauses consist of repetitions of syllables and words, reformulation or false starts where the speaker rephrases his speech to fit the representation he best perceives, grammatical repairs, and partial repeats where speakers are often searching for the right words in their lexicon to carry across their intended meaning. There are basically three distinct forms for filled pauses: (i) an elongated central vowel only; (ii) a nasal murmur only; and (iii) a central vowel followed by a nasal murmur. Although a schwa-like quality, appears to be the most commonly used, some speakers consistently using the neutral vowel instead, and others use both vowels in the same sentence, depending on the quality of the previous word last vowel. Filled pauses vocalizations may be built around central vowels and speakers may differ in their preferences, but that they do not appear to behave as other words in the language. The lengthening of words ending in a coronal fricative, for instance, could be obtained by prolonging the entire rhyme and/or the fricative only. Most of the time, however, the neutral vowel is appended to achieve the desired effect.
Prolonged pauses
Similarly to filled pauses, single occurrences of prolonged pauses occurring between stretches of fluent speech, may be preceded and followed by silent pauses, as they most often occur on function words with a CV or V structure. Even though they are not always central, the vowels of such syllables may be as long as the ones observed for filled pauses.
Retraced and unretraced restarts
Riggenbach’s 1991 study of fluency development in Chinese learners of English had an analysis of repair phenomena, which included retraced restarts and unretraced restarts. Retraced restarts refer to the reformulations whereby a portion of the original utterance is duplicated. They can either involve repetition, that is, the precise adjacent duplication of a sound, syllable, word or phrase, or insertion, which refers to a retraced restart with the addition of new unretraced lexical items. Conversely, unretraced restarts refer to reformulations that rejects the original utterance, similarly known as false starts.
Read more about this topic: Automatic Speech, Characteristics of Automatic Speech, Linguistic Features
Famous quotes containing the word morphology:
“I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language.... To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”
—Frantz Fanon (19251961)