The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are
initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers
can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a …

Research on the exploitation of prosodic information in the comprehension of spoken
language is reviewed. The research falls into three main areas: the use of prosody in the
recognition of spoken words, in which most attention has been paid to the question of …

The production of coherent discourse is an interactive process that requires speakers to
draw upon several different types of communicative knowledge that complement more code-
based grammatical knowledge of sound, form, and meaning per se. Two aspects of …

It is clear that a printed text provides the reader with more information than the words alone.
This includes punctuation marks, capitalisation, paragraphs, headings and sub-headings, all
of which help the reader to understand how the words are organised into sentences, and …

Despite their frequency in conversational talk, little is known about how ums and uhs affect
listeners' on-line processing of spontaneous speech. Two studies of ums and uhs in English
and Dutch reveal that hearing an uh has a beneficial effect on listeners' ability to recognize …

This paper presents the design and the evaluation of a method to study prosodic features of
discourse structure in unrestricted spontaneous speech. Past work has indicated that one of
the major difficulties that discourse prosody analysts have to overcome is finding an …

Eye-tracking and gating experiments examined reference comprehension with fluent (Click
on the red...) and disfluent (Click on [pause] thee uh red...) instructions while listeners
viewed displays with 2 familiar (eg, ice cream cones) and 2 unfamiliar objects (eg, squiggly …

This paper describes two experiments on the role of audiovisual prosody for signalling and
detecting meta-cognitive information in question answering. The first study consists of an
experiment, in which participants are asked factual questions in a conversational setting …

In this paper, I set out to investigate what Lancashire (1996) calls' repetitive phrasal
chunkiness', ie highly recurrent word combinations (HRWCs), in native speaker and
advanced EFL learner spontaneous speech and formal essay writing on the basis of …

Information provided by examination of the skills that underlie holistic scores can be used
not only as supporting evidence for the validity of inferences associated with performance
tests but also as a way to improve the scoring rubrics, descriptors, and benchmarks …