Prolongations: A dark horse in the disfluency stable

This paper studies a specific type of disfluency, viz. segment prolongation (PR), i.e., the “stretching out” of speech sounds as a means of hesitation. It is shown that the occurrence of PRs varies as a function of phone type, position in the word, lexical factors and word class, and that PRs are subject to phonotactic constraints in Swedish. A comparison between Swedish and Tok Pisin suggests that there are language specific traits associated with PR production