Pauses and hesitations in French spontaneous speech

In traditional terminology, silent and filled pauses are grouped together, whereas hesitation lengthening is put into a separate category. However, while these various phenomena are very often associated, there have been few studies on how they interact. We analyzed an hour of spontaneous speech to show that silent and filled pauses operate in a totally different way, and that contrary to common belief, silent pauses by themselves never serve as hesitation markers, but only do so when coupled with other markers—mostly syllabic lengthening and filled pauses. These last two hesitation markers have similar acoustic and articulatory characteristics; they are also distributed and function alike.