Can spontaneous spoken language disfluencies help describe syntactic dependencies? An empirical study

摘要

This paper explores the correlations between key syntactic dependencies and the occurrence of simple spoken language disfluencies such as filled pauses and incomplete words. The working hypothesis here is that interruptions caused by these phenomena are more likely to happen between weakly connected words from a syntactic point of view than between strongly connected ones. The obtained results show significant patterns with the regard to key syntactic phenomena, like confirming the positive correlation between the frequency of disfluencies and multiples measures of syntactic complexity. In addition, they show that there is a stronger relationship between the verb and its subject than with its object, which confirms the idea of a hierarchical incrementality. Also, this work uncovered an interesting role played by a verb particle as a syntactic delimiter of some verb complements. Finally, the interruptions by disfluencies patterns show that verbs have a more privileged relationship with their preposition compared to the object Noun Phrase (NP).