Pause-internal phonetic particles in speech communication

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Bernd Möbius; Dr. Jürgen Trouvain
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 418659027

The project aims at investigating the phonetic particles contained in speech pauses, such as breath noises or tongue clicks. These particles have been largely neglected in phonetic analyses in contrast to fillers in "filled pauses". The key research question of the project is: What are the contributions of pauses and selected pause-internal phonetic particles (PIPPs) to the phonetic encoding and decoding in spoken language? Based on the analysis of existing speech corpora, across languages and speaking styles, and complemented by new experimental data, we plan to provide an inventory of PIPPs, along with descriptions of their phonetic characteristics and possible communicative functions. In the domain of speech production, the project will focus on the acoustic manifestations of PIPPs, with special attention to the relationship between breathing acoustics and breathing kinematics in our own data. In the domain of speech perception, listening experiments will address the ease of processing and retention, by manipulating pauses and PIPPs, to explore the interplay between the principles of economy of effort (hypospeech) and clarity (hyperspeech). In addition, synthetic speech will be modeled with respect to pauses and PIPPs, and evaluated by listening tests.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants