@article {468, title = {Poster: Self-interruptions and repetitions in spontaneous dialogues and their speaker-specificity}, year = {2019}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands}, abstract = {Disfluencies, such as self-interruptions and repetitions, provide a window on the speech production and self-repair process. Most knowledge on these disfluency types comes from experimental tasks and monologues [e.g. 1,2]. However, most of everyday speech consists of spontaneous dialogues, a speech style which can be argued to differ markedly from experimentally elicited speech, because it requires more planning and aspects of dialogue management [e.g. 3,4]. In addition, little is known about inter-speaker variation in the production of disfluencies. As a result, theories on speech production and self-repair generally do not include variation. There is thus a gap in knowledge, leading to the following questions: (a) What is the distribution of self-interruptions and repetitions and their characteristics in spontaneous face-to-face dialogues and (b) how speaker-specific are they? These questions were investigated by annotating interruptions and self-repetitions and several of their characteristics in spontaneous Dutch face-to-face dialogues and analyzing their distributions, which were compared to those obtained in earlier work on other speech styles. Specific distributions for spontaneous speech were found, suggesting that disfluency behavior depends on speech style and allowing for an evaluation of several self-repair models and theories. Moreover, self-interruptions and repetitions showed inter-speaker variation and contained some speaker-specific information. References [1] Levelt, W. (1983). Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cognition, 14(1), 41-104. [2] Levelt, W. (1984). Spontaneous self-repairs in speech: Processes and representations. In 10th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 105-117). Foris. [3] Sacks, H., Schegloff, I., \& Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language, 50, 696-735. [4] Schegloff, E. A. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language in society, 29(1), 1-63. }, author = {Sanne Ditewig} } @article {21, title = {Regional variation in the pronunciation of /s/ in the Dutch language area}, year = {2017}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

In this socio-phonetic study we investigated regional variation in the realization of /s/ in the Dutch language area, and tested the observation that /s/ is sometimes pronounced more like [ʃ] (so-called s-retraction), especially in the Randstad (Collins \& Mees, 2003, p. 190).

One hundred native speakers born and raised in one of five regions of the Dutch language area (West Flanders, Flemish Brabant, Netherlands Limburg, South Holland, Groningen) produced nineteen monosyllabic words containing /s/ in different syllabic contexts. Spectral centre of gravity (CoG) was measured to assess the degree of s-retraction: CoG of /s/ is higher than that of /ʃ/. CoG values were significantly lower (consistent with more retraction) in the Dutch regions than in the Flemish regions. Male speakers displayed a more retracted pronunciation than females. From our data it is unclear whether these differences are solely caused by anatomical differences or constitute evidence for a sociolinguistic gender effect in an incipient sound change.

In conclusion, /s/ shows regional variation in Standard Dutch. The pattern is not fully consistent with the observation forwarded by Collins \& Mees (2003): s-retraction is found in an area larger than the Randstad, possibly pointing towards a North-South variation pattern (Belgian vs. Netherlandic Dutch).

References:

{\textbullet} Collins, B. \& I. Mees (2003). The phonetics of English and Dutch, fifth revised edition. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV.

}, author = {Anne-France Pinget and Sanne Ditewig and Willemijn Heeren} }