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Measuring Syntactic Complexity in Spontaneous Spoken Swedish

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Author

Summary, in English

Hesitation disfluencies after phonetically prominent stranded function words are thought to reflect the cognitive coding of complex structures. Speech fragments following the Swedish function word att ‘that’ were analyzed syntactically, and divided into two groups: one with att in disfluent contexts, and the other with att in fluent contexts. Complexity was calculated in terms of a number of measures related to syntactic tree structures produced by the analysis tool GRAMMAL. Results showed that disfluent att is in general associated with significantly higher mean complexity values than fluent att. This information can be used to predict whether the function word at the beginning of a fragment is likely to be disfluent or not. Two kinds of statistical classification algorithms (Bayesian and neural networks) were used to test this hypothesis. The best result was 71% correctly classified cases, which is significantly better than a system that is based on selecting the data’s majority class.

Publishing year

2007

Language

English

Pages

227-245

Publication/Series

Language and Speech

Volume

50

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Kingston Press Ltd

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Keywords

  • hesitation disfluency
  • Syntactic complexity
  • function words
  • spontaneous speech

Status

Published

Project

  • The role of function words in spontaneous speech processing

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1756-6053