This study focused on durational cues (i.e., syllable duration, pause duration, and syllable onset intervals (SOIs)) at discourse boundaries in two dialects of Mandarin,Taiwan and Mainland varieties. Speech was elicited by having 18 participants describe events in The Pear Story film. Recorded data were transcribed, labeled, and segmented into clauses. Discourse boundary indices were used to la...

BACKGROUND Perishock pauses are pauses in chest compressions before and after defibrillatory shock. We examined the relationship between perishock pauses and survival to hospital discharge. METHODS AND RESULTS We included out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients in the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium Epistry-Cardiac Arrest who suffered arrest between December 2005 and June 2007, presented wi...

Under constant applied force, the separation of double-stranded DNA into two single strands is known to proceed through a series of pauses and jumps. Given experimental traces of constant-force unzipping, we present a method whereby the locations of pause points can be extracted in the form of a pause point spectrum. A simple theoretical model of DNA constant-force unzipping is presented, which...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Falls are common and often take place in the home. Risk of fall increases if the environment is dimly lit. Longer sitting pause times, before standing, might improve postural stability after standing from a supine position. The purpose of this investigation was to measure the effects of sitting pause times on postural sway velocity immediately following a supine-to-standi...

During their entire lives, weakly electric fish produce an uninterrupted train of discharges to electrolocate objects and to communicate. In an attempt to learn about activity-dependent processes that might be involved in this ability, the continuous train of discharges of intact Gymnotus carapo was experimentally interrupted to investigate how this pausing affects post-pause electric organ dis...

Predicting the location of pauses from text is an important aspect for speech synthesizers. The accuracy of pause prediction can significantly influence both naturalness and intelligibility. Pauses which help listeners to better parse the synthesized speech into meaningful units are deemed to increase naturalness and intelligibility ratings, while pauses in unexpected or incorrect locations can...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the validity and performance of an algorithm designed to automatically extract pauses and speech timing information from connected speech samples. Speech samples were obtained from 10 people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and 10 control speakers. Pauses were identified manually and algorithmically from digitally recorded recitations of a speech pa...