Factors Affecting Clause-Initial Filler Probability in an English Monologue Corpus

Abstract

We investigated factors affecting clause-initial filler probability using an English monologue corpus, and compared the results with those of Japanese studies. The most powerful predictor was boundary strength before clauses. Clause-initial filler probability was higher at sentence boundaries than at clause boundaries, which is contradictory to results of Japanese. The number of words in clauses had a significant effect. Clause-initial filler probability increased with the number of words both in English and Japanese. The results from studies of two languages indicate that speech planning difficulties that fillers mainly reflect may differ depending on the language.