Prosodic Marking, Pitch and Intensity in Spontaneous Lexical Self-Repair in Dutch

Abstract

This paper presents results of a phonetic analysis of instances of lexical selfrepair drawn from a corpus of spontaneous Dutch speech. The analysis addresses questions concerning the phonetic details of prosodic marking in self-repair and its conditioning factors. In particular, it examines the relevance of semantic, temporal and frequency-related factors in modelling f0 and intensity measures and auditory judgements of whether repairs are prosodically marked. It addresses the extent to which observations made in studies using experimentally-elicited speech can be expected to generalise to repairs drawn from uncontrolled spontaneous speech. The results suggest that prosodic marking is rare in spontaneous lexical self-repair, and that semantic, temporal and frequency factors play a limited role only in conditioning speakers' choices for or against prosodic marking, although several weak tendencies can be observed.