Disfluencies in Public and Private Speech

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Disfluency rates vary based on audience, interaction, topic difficulty, broadcast status, and speech pre-scripting.
• Understanding these variations is crucial for comprehending communication dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate quantitative differences in disfluency use between public and private speech in Slovenian.
• To explain these differences by examining the relationship between disfluency functions and influencing communication factors.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of spoken Slovenian data from the Training Corpus of Spoken Slovenian ROG-Artur.
• Quantitative comparison of disfluency frequencies in public versus private speech.
• Qualitative contextual analysis of disfluency functions and influencing factors.

Main Results:

• Overall disfluencies are more frequent in private speech.
• Filled pauses, unrepaired pronunciations, and blocks are more common in public speech.
• Disfluency reduction in public speech is linked to relevance, formality, pre-scripting, time constraints, and skills.

Conclusions:

• Public speech involves reduced overall disfluencies but increased specific types (filled pauses, blocks) due to factors like longer turns and stress.
• Findings offer insights into speech adaptation strategies in different communicative contexts.
• Results should be interpreted cautiously due to qualitative analysis and potential speaker variability.