A preliminary investigation of filled pauses in Maltese

Abstract

Spontaneous speech, unlike read speech, is replete with filled pauses (FPs) and other disfluencies. Evidence exists that FPs have their own specific phonetic, including prosodic, characteristics, as well as an important discourse function. This paper reports preliminary results on Maltese FPs based on analysis of a corpus of Maltese Map Task dialogues. Three FPs, namely ee, em and mm, consisting of a vocalic and/or a nasal element, are identified, ee being the shortest in duration and mm the longest. The study presents distributional analyses in terms of surrounding pauses and breaks and of sentential position. A strong tendency for the three FPs to be preceded and/or followed by silence, and to occur more frequently at the beginning of sentences rather than in the middle, is demonstrated. These results support evidence of the important role of FPs in the planning, organisation and production of discourse in Maltese, as in other languages.