In this study, we investigate the characteristics of pausing in speakers’ production and listeners’ interpretation in three different speaking styles in Swedish: elicited spontaneous dialogues, professional and non-professional news reading. Considerable attention is given to the positions in which pauses can appear, in particular their discourse context regarding theme shift. We show that the ...

Pause is not only one of the cues of prosodic structure for running speech, but also one of the strategies used by speakers to express their emotions. In this paper, we investigated the silent pauses in read and spontaneous speech, neutral and expressive speech, as well as synthesized speech, trying to find the difference of silent pause patterns in different speech styles. It was observed that...

It was hypothesized that temporal pauses in letter series are the major places at which receding occurs, either in terms of a pronunciation code (e.g., VAF) or a meaningful code (e.g., IBM). If pauses determine the units on which receding is attempted, then there will be an optimal and several nonoptimal ways to locate pauses in a given series of codable trigrams. Three immediate recall experim...

Pauses in spontaneous speech have a less restricted distribution than pauses in read discourse; however, they are not distributed in a haphazard way. The majority of the perceived pauses in the examined Swedish spontaneous speech material, 73%, occurred in one of the following positions: between sentences, after discourse markers and conjunctions, and before accented content words. There is a r...

Elongation factor P (EF-P) is required for the efficient synthesis of proteins with stretches of consecutive prolines and other motifs that would otherwise lead to ribosome pausing. However, previous reports also demonstrated that levels of most diprolyl-containing proteins are not altered by the deletion of efp. To define the particular sequences that trigger ribosome stalling at diprolyl (PPX...

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 commo...

A 42 yr old woman from Zambia presented with complaints of fatigue and occasional palpitations for four months. The palpitations were momentary and recurrent but never sustained. She had a history of hypertensionwhich was well controlled on telmisartan. Other than that, the past history was unremarkable. Below is the ECG at presentation. Recurrent premature complexes and pauses are seen. How ar...

Prosody has been claimed to have a critical role in the acquisition of grammatical information from speech. The exact mechanisms by which prosodic cues enhance learning are fully unknown. Rules from language often require the extraction of non-adjacent dependencies (e.g., he plays, he sings, he speaks). It has been proposed that pauses enhance learning because they allow computing non-adjacent ...

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...

Purkinje cells (PCs) in the mammalian cerebellum express high-frequency spontaneous activity with average spike rates between 30 and 200 Hz. Cerebellar nuclear (CN) neurons receive converging input from many PCs, resulting in a continuous barrage of inhibitory inputs. It has been hypothesized that pauses in PC activity trigger increases in CN spiking activity. A prediction derived from this hyp...