Segment prolongation in Hebrew

In this paper we study segment prolongations (PRs), a type of disfluency sometimes included under the term “hesitation disfluencies”, in Hebrew. PRs have previously been studied in a number of other languages within a comprehensive speech disfluency framework, which is applied to Hebrew in the current study. For the purpose of this study we defined Hebrew clitics, such as conjunctions, articles, prepositions and so on, as words. The most striking difference between Hebrew and the previously studies languages is how restricted PRs seem to be in Hebrew, occurring almost exclusively on word-final vowels. The most frequently prolonged vowel is [e]. The segment type does not affect PRs’ duration. We found significant differences between men and women regarding the frequency of PRs.