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<Paper uid="W00-1004">
  <Title>Issues in the Transcription of English Conversational Grunts</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="34" end_page="34" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Open Issues
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This notation assumes that the component sounds are categorical (except for creakiness and pitch), but this may in fact not be the case. Rather it may be that the phonetic components of grunts have a &amp;quot;gradual, rather than binary, oppositional character&amp;quot; (3akobson and Waugh, 1979). This is a problem especially for nasalization and for vowels: it may be that there is an infinite number of slightly but significantly different variations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Further study is required.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Experiments with multiple independent labelers are needed to evaluate usability and measure cross-labeler agreement.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Applying this notation can be complicated by dialect and individual differences. For example, the primary filler for one speaker in our corpus was aura. Right now it is not known whether this is a mere pronunciation variation, perhaps dialect-related, or significantly different from urn. More study is needed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Other languages also have conversational grunts, for example, oua/s and hien in French, ja and hm in German, and un, he and ya in Japanese (Ward, 1998), and it may be possible to use or adapt the present scheme for these and other languages.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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