Abstract
Filled pauses are widely considered as a relatively consistent feature of an individual's speech. However, acoustic consistency has only been observed within single-session recordings. By comparing filled pauses in two recordings made >2.5 years apart, this study investigates within-speaker consistency of the vowels in the filled pauses uh and um, in both first language (L1) Dutch and second language (L2) English, produced by student speakers who are known to converge in other speech features. Results show that despite minor within-speaker differences between languages, the spectral characteristics of filled pauses in L1 and L2 remained stable over time.
Highlights
The filled pauses uh and um are considered useful features in forensic speaker comparisons because their characteristics are highly speaker specific (e.g., Hughes et al, 2016)
By comparing filled pauses in two recordings made >2.5 years apart, this study investigates within-speaker consistency of the vowels in the filled pauses uh and um, in both first language (L1) Dutch and second language (L2) English, produced by student speakers who are known to converge in other speech features
We aimed to investigate to what extent this particular linguistic environment may affect the within-speaker consistency of filled pauses in L1 Dutch and L2 English
Summary
The filled pauses uh and um are considered useful features in forensic speaker comparisons because their (spectral) characteristics are highly speaker specific (e.g., Hughes et al, 2016). Speaker specificity means that there is variation between different speakers and that a feature is rather consistent in an individual’s speech. 24), the proportions filled to silent pauses and uh to um (Ku€nzel, 1997), the extent to which a speaker uses alternative pausing strategies such as wordfinal lengthening (McDougall and Duckworth, 2017), and the filled pauses’ fundamental frequency (Braun and Rosin, 2015). The vowels used in filled pauses have been described as acoustically consistent within speakers in a single recording (e.g., Hughes et al, 2016; Ku€nzel, 1997). Are speakers’ filled pause vowels acoustically consistent across recordings made weeks or months apart? Are speakers’ filled pause vowels acoustically consistent across recordings made weeks or months apart? In this paper, we aim to answer that question, using recordings from the same speakers made >2.5 years apart
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