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Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to detect disfluency in spontaneous speech. All three employed gated word recognition with judgments of disfluency for spontaneous utterances containing disfluencies and for three kinds of fluent control utterances from the same six speakers. (Author/JL)

Clause-internal filled pauses and preceding peak fundamental frequency (F0) values were analyzed to determine whether the intonation of filled pauses is relative to, or independent of, prior prosodic context. Higher peaks were found to be systematically associated with higher filled-pause values, supporting the 'relative' hypothesis. A linear model, in which filled-pause F0 was expressed as an invariant (over speakers) proportion of the distance between preceding peak F0 and a speaker-dependent baseline F0, produced results nearly identical to those of a two-parameter model in which the coefficients of peak and baseline were allowed to vary freely. The model was less appropriate for filled pauses after sentence-initial peaks, but unaffected by temporal variables.