disfluencyinterruptions

Disfluency interruptions are events in spoken language where the smooth progression of speech is disrupted in association with disfluency phenomena such as hesitations, repetitions, or reformulations. They capture moments when a speaker’s turn-to-turn production is interrupted or rerouted by planning constraints, self-corrections, or external interruptions, and are often analyzed in discourse and production studies.

Within-speaker disfluency interruptions include hesitations (silent or filled pauses), repetitions (repeating segments of speech), and repairs (self-corrections that modify prior utterances). These interruptions reflect ongoing planning and monitoring processes as the speaker selects upcoming content, reorganizes syntactic structure, or adjusts lexical choices. External interruptions involve another speaker interrupting or overlapping during a disfluency, which can amplify or alter the observed disruption in the original utterance.

Prosodic and temporal features help characterize disfluency interruptions: the length of pauses around the disfluency, changes in intonation or pitch resets after the interruption, and alterations in speaking rate before or after the event. These cues provide insight into cognitive load, turn-taking dynamics, and communicative strategies such as signaling reluctance, delaying a move in conversation, or inviting repair from a listener.

Measurement and analysis typically rely on transcript annotations that mark disfluencies and interruptions, along with metrics such as interruption rate, pause duration, and repair type. Disfluency interruptions are relevant to fields including psycholinguistics, conversation analysis, and speech pathology, where they inform theories of speech planning, fluency disorders, and interactional competence.