Periodic cycles of hesitation phenomena in spontaneous speech

To verify whether hesitation phenomena are distributed periodically in spontaneous speech, twenty speech samples produced by five male adults were analyzed. Spectral analysis allowed for three main findings. First, hesitations present stationary behavior, which implies they did not accumulate in the beginning, in the middle, or in the end of speech samples. Second, periodic cycles of hesitation phenomena were detected in all speech samples (mean cycle duration around 13 seconds). This implies that regions with more hesitations tended to regularly alternate with regions with fewer hesitations. Third, periodic cycles accounted for about 30% of variance in data.