Pollkläsener, Christina; Kunilovskaya, Maria
Euh… where do interpreters hesitate? An information-theoretic perspective on sentence-initial filler particles in simultaneous interpreting
12th edition of the Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech Workshop (DiSS 2025), pp. 92-96, 2025.
This study investigates the occurrence of sentence-initial filler particles (e.g. euh, hum) in simultaneously interpreted and original speeches using a bidirectional English-German corpus of European Parliament debates. We assume that sentence-initial filler particles indicate planning difficulties at the conceptual level, whereas sentence-medial filler particles mark hesitations over syntactic structure or lexical access. Since interpreters convey the source speech and do not plan their own message, we expect differences between interpreting and original speeches. We operationalise conceptual complexity as average word surprisal per sentence and local lexical or syntactic production problems as surprisal of the word following the filler particle. Our findings indicate that sentence-initial filler particles appear in sentences with higher conceptual complexity but are not well associated with local retrieval difficulty.