The role and prosodic characteristics of hesitation lengthening and filled pauses in speech planning in Maltese

Abstract

This paper examines two phenomena which occur in speech, rather than during periods of silence: hesitation lengthening of lexical elements, and filled pauses involving non-lexical elements. An interesting characteristic of hesitation lengthening of lexical elements is that there do not seem to be any constraints on what element within the segmental and syllabic stream gets lengthened: although there is a tendency for the final (often unstressed) syllable to be lengthened, it seems possible for lengthening to affect any element within the segmental stream. The two phenomena share a number of features, the most prominent of which are marked lengthening and level F0. More significantly, both phenomena have a clear turn-holding effect: change of speaker rarely occurs when hesitation lengthening takes place. What is also interesting is that filled pauses come in two forms, one of which exhibits some sort of heightening of the usual characteristics for this sort of element. The discourse function of turn-holding which occurs in all cases of hesitation lengthening on lexical elements occurs also in the case of filled pauses but only when these also involve lengthening.