Distribution and Acoustic Characteristics of Filled Pauses in Spontaneous Urdu Speech

This study examines the distribution and acoustic characteristics of filled pauses (FPs) in Urdu, a language underrepresented in disfluency research. Drawing on a spontaneous speech dataset from 18 female speakers, the analysis considers the types of FPs, their immediate segmental context, and their utterance position. The analysis also evaluates the effects of segmental context and utterance position on acoustic measures of FPs. Results show a dominant use of vocalic FPs. Moreover, FPs observe systematic contextual patterns and cluster in specific utterance positions. Acoustically, vowel-only and vowel–nasal FPs differ in duration and vowel height (F1). For vowel-only FPs, utterance position significantly conditions duration and prosodic properties (F0, intensity), whereas segmental context does not show any effects. Taken together, the findings demonstrate a language-specific organization of FPs in Urdu. This study offers a detailed phonetic account of Urdu FPs to date and highlights the importance of language-sensitive disfluency modeling in speech technology applications.