Prosodic marking and predictability in lexical self-repair

This paper reports on an investigation of lexical self-repair in Dutch spontaneous dialogue. Lexical self-repairs, in which one word is rejected for another, can be produced with or without notable ‘prosodic marking’ of the second word. It remains unclear what motivates speakers’ choices, but previous research has shown that the semantic distance between the two words is relevant. This study assesses the relevance of the words’ predictability. Prosodic marking judgements are modelled using an established semantic classification and a range of probabilistic variables, including both frequency-based and cloze-based measures. Results suggest that probabilistic measures add little predictive power to the semantic classification, although informative data trends can be observed.