In the current study, intra-turn pause variation has been investigated within and between speakers in dialogues. Results show that there is a tendency for different speakers to prefer different pause locations within turns. There was further a significant correlation in the majority of the dialogues between how the median lengths of pauses varied for the speakers over the course of the dialogue...

UNLABELLED To examine changes in monophasic action potential duration (APD) with a pacing protocol similar to that used during electrophysiological testing, action potentials were recorded in vivo from the left ventricular apical endocardium of 12 normal mongrel dogs. The atrioventricular node was ablated and the dogs paced from the anterior right ventricle at a baseline cycle length of 1000 ms...

Research on pause duration has mainly focused on the impact of syntactic structure on the duration of pauses within an utterance and on the impact of syntax, discourse, and prosodic structure on the likelihood of pause occurrence. Relatively little is known about what factors play a role in determining the duration of pauses between utterances or phrases. Two experiments examining the effect of...

This paper studied effects of topic structure and sentence length on acoustic parameters at intonational phrases boundaries, comparing female and male speakers. Twenty native speakers of Mandarin Chinese read 12 short discourses,which contained two sentences. The second sentence was either short or long. And, the transition between the two sentences was either topic continuation, topic elaborat...

This study investigates prosodic planning in a reading task in German. We analyse how the utterance length and syntactic complexity of an upcoming sentence affect two acoustic parameters (pause duration and the initial fundamental frequency peak) and two respiratory parameters (inhalation depth and inhalation duration). Two experiments were carried out. In the first experiment, data for twelve ...

Generating natural sounding synthetic speech from text requires a division of a text into IPs and assigning pauses between those phrases. A difficulty which faces attempts to model pauses quantitatively is high degree of variability exhibited by speakers in pause placement and duration. The present study seeks to investigate if Synchronous Speech (speech elicited when two speakers are asked to ...

The presence of inhalation breaths in speech pauses has recently attracted more attention especially since the focus of speech synthesis research has shifted to prosodic aspects beyond a single sentence, as, for instance in the synthesis of audiobooks. Inhalation breath pauses are usually not an issue in traditional speech synthesis corpora because they typically use single sentences of limited...

Generating natural sounding synthetic speech from text requires a division of a text into IPs and assigning pauses between those phrases. A difficulty which faces attempts to model pauses quantitatively is high degree of variability exhibited by speakers in pause placement and duration. The present study seeks to investigate if Synchronous Speech (speech elicited when two speakers are asked to ...

We manually designed rules for a backchannel (BC) prediction model based on pitch and pause information. In short, the model predicts a BC when there is a pause of a certain length that is preceded by a falling or rising pitch. This model was validated against the Dutch IFADV Corpus in a corpus-based evaluation method. The results showed that our model performs slightly better than another well...