Acoustics of Dutch filled pauses : general trends and variation

In several languages, filled pauses (i.e. uh, um) have been described as speaker-specific (e.g. Horvath, 2010; Hughes et al., 2016; Kunzel, 1997). In ongoing work we evaluate the speaker-specificity of filled pauses across languages, specifically in speakers with L1 Dutch and L2 English: do speakers maintain their hesitation behavior across languages? So far, filled pauses have been largely ignored in phonetic descriptions of Dutch, whereas they are highly frequent (De Jong, 2017). The most specific paper describes Dutch uh as a schwa (Swerts, 1998). Whereas the same description has been given to filled pauses in English (e.g. Hughes et al., 2016) and Hungarian (Horvath, 2010), phonetic measurements in these languages show between-language differences in mean formant values of over 100 Hz. The data collected to answer our main research question also allows for a phonetic description of Dutch filled pauses. We analyzed 2,962 tokens from 20 male and 59 female native speakers of Dutch. Measurements included type (i.e. uh or um), fundamental frequency, duration, and vowel formants. References De Jong, N. (2017). Spreekvaardigheid en vloeiendheid. Vakwerk 11: Selectie uit de lezingen en presentaties conferentie BVNT2, Amsterdam 2017 (pp. 37-45). Horvath, V. (2010). Filled pauses in Hungarian: Their phonetic form and function. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 57(2-3), 288-306. Hughes, V., Foulkes, P., & Wood, S. (2016). Strength of forensic voice comparison evidence from the acoustics of filled pauses. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 23, 99-132. Kunzel, H. J. (1997). Some general phonetic and forensic aspects of speaking tempo. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 4(1), 48-83. Swerts, M. (1998). Filled pauses as markers of discourse structure. Journal of pragmatics, 30(4), 485-496.