8–12 Sept 2026
Europe/Vienna timezone

How 'ahem' and 'also' affect perceived fluency, clarity and understandability

FA2026/93
9 Sept 2026, 15:00
3h
Messehalle (Poster+Exhibition) (Messe Congress Graz)

Messehalle (Poster+Exhibition)

Messe Congress Graz

A20 Speech A20.00 Speech

Speaker

Barbara Schuppler (Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory)

Description

This study investigates the perception of disfluencies in speech, focusing on the fillers aehm" andalso". Using conversational speech recordings from the Austrian German GRASS corpus, we select 72 stimuli similiarly long in number of tokens that contained either aehm" oralso" and conduct a perception experiment with 30 participants. During the experiment, listeners rated for each stimulus how well they understood the content of the stimulus (i.e., understandability), how clearly pronounced or reduced they perceived the stimulus (i.e., clarity), and also how fluently spoken or disturbingly disfluent they perceived the stimulus. Our statistical analysis shows that speech stimuli containing aehm" tend to receive significantly higher ratings in clarity, understandability, and fluency than stimuli containingalso". Further, the results show correlations among listeners' perceptions of these three dimensions. Overall, the findings contribute to a better understanding of how specific disfluency markers influence speech perception and highlight the importance of considering specific filler types when studying spoken language processing.

Authors

Barbara Schuppler (Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory) Johannes Hagmüller (Graz University of Technology)

Presentation materials