On Filled-Pauses and Prolongations in European Portuguese

This paper reports preliminary results from a study of disfluencies in European Portuguese, based on a corpus of prepared (non-scripted) and spontaneous oral presentations in high school context. We will focus on the contextual distribution and temporal patterns of filled pauses and segmental prolongations, as well as on the way those are rated by listeners. Results suggest that filled pauses and segmental prolongations behave alike, have similar functions and may be considered in complementary distribution, obeying general syntactic and prosodic constraints. Index Terms spontaneous speech, disfluencies, prosody. 1