Towards an inclusive system for the annotation of (dis)fluency in typical and atypical speech.

This paper presents an operational annotation system for (dis)fluencies in typical and atypical speech, based on existing standard annotation schemes previously established in the literature. Grounded in a functional approach to (dis)fluency, we address some of the conceptual and technical limitations found in previous annotation models, and offer an integrated and inclusive system which is compatible with different multi-layered annotation software such as Praat or ELAN. Our aim is twofold: to create comparable annotated corpora both in typical and atypical speech, and to provide natural language processing and the health sector with applications for diagnostic and therapy in speech disorders.

Negation Cancels Discourse-Level Processing Differences: Evidence from Reading Times in Concession and Result Relations.

Seminal studies on negation revealed that negative sentences are difficult to process, as they require an extra mental step. Similarly, at the discourse level, concession has been repeatedly shown to be more complex than other relations such as result because it implies the denial of an inference. The affinity between negation and concession prompted the present study to test whether overt verb polarity would affect the processing of upcoming discourse relations.

Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language.

Discourse connectives are lexical items like "but" and "so" that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched.

Can filled pauses be represented as linguistic items? Investigating the effect of exposure on the perception and production of .

The current paper presents three studies that investigated the effect of exposure on the mental representations of filled pauses (). In Study 1, a corpus analysis identified the frequency of co-occurrence of filled pauses with words located immediately before or after them in naturalistic spoken adult British English (BNC2014). Based on the collocations identified in Study 1, in Study 2, 22 native British English-speaking adults heard sentences in which the location of filled pauses and the co-occurring words were manipulated and the participants were asked to judge the acceptability of the sentences heard.

The dual status of filled pauses: Evidence from genre, proficiency and co-occurrence.

The present corpus study aims to contribute to the debate regarding the lexical or non-lexical status of filled pauses. Although they are commonly associated with hesitation, disfluency, and production difficulty, it has also been argued that they can serve more fluent communicative functions in discourse (e.g.