Is It a Filler or a Pause? A Quantitative Analysis of Filled Pauses in Hebrew

In this study, we investigate quantitatively the use of Filled Pauses in Hebrew and compare them to the use of silence-based attributes and fluency-based attributes in task-oriented dialogues. Our aim is to explore whether the use of Filled Pauses in Hebrew supports either the filler-as-word hypothesis or the filler-as-pause hypothesis. We computed seven measures as independent variables, among them: Normalized rate of words, Filled Pauses rate, silent pauses rate, and articulation rate. Findings show that Filled Pauses occur twice as many as the most frequent words and on the other hand, Filled Pauses are far less frequent than the overall number of silent pauses. We did find that Filled Pauses are correlated with a sub-category of silent pauses. Our analysis supports that Filled Pauses used by Hebrew speakers are closer to the filler-as-pause hypothesis. Further, speakers would use FPs differently depending on their role in the Map Task dialogues.