Little is known about the determining influences on the length of silent intervals at IP boundaries and no current models accurately predict their duration. The contribution of independent factors with different characteristic properties to pause duration needs to be explored. The present study seeks to investigate if pause duration is correlated with the length of sentences or phrases precedin...

A synchronous speech study investigates effects on pause duration of prosodic phrases of different length. The goal is to examine local and distant effects of prosodic phrase length on pause duration. Subjects read 24 English sentences varying along the parameters: a) length in syllables (long or short) of the intonation phrase immediately following a target pause and b) length in syllables (lo...

Effects of contextual length are known to affect pause durations in neutral speech. The present study investigates these effects on an expressive corpus of read tales in French. Computational models of intra-sentence, and inter-sentence pause durations, as functions of contextual lengths are proposed. These models are aimed at improving Text-To-Speech synthesis systems, and provide clues for sy...

It has long been noted that conversational partners tend to exhibit increasingly similar pitch, intensity, and timing behavior over the course of a conversation. However, the metrics developed to measure this similarity to date have generally failed to capture the dynamic temporal aspects of this process. In this paper, we propose new approaches to measuring interlocutor similarity in spoken di...

In this study, pauses within speakers’ turns are described and analysed. Tentative results show that different pauses within a speaker’s turn might differ in length. Pause length variations over time in dialogues were investigated, and in 5 out of 6 dialogues, a statistically significant correlation was found between the speakers’ variations in pause length.

Neurons of the cerebellar nuclei convey the final output of the cerebellum to their targets in various parts of the brain. Within the cerebellum their direct upstream connections originate from inhibitory Purkinje neurons. Purkinje neurons have a complex firing pattern of regular spikes interrupted by intermittent pauses of variable length. How can the cerebellar nucleus process this complex in...

In this study we investigated how pause length and pause ratio influence listeners in ascribing emotional states to the speaker, if nothing but the length of the pauses changes. We did this by taking emotionally neutral speech samples and manipulating the length of pauses. Our results show that the same speech samples were perceived to be happier, more positive, more heated, and concurrently le...

This study determined the effect of the duration of the intertrain pause on the ventricular effective refractory period (VERP) measured by the extrastimulus technique using conventional eight-beat basic drive trains. In 50 subjects, the VERP was measured using a basic drive train cycle length of 500 msec, 2-msec steps in the extrastimulus coupling interval, and intertrain pauses of 0, 1, 4, 8, ...

We consider the use of natural pauses to aid analysis of spontaneous speech, studying four Japanese dialogues concerning a simulated direction-finding task. Using new techniques, we added to existing transcripts information concerning the placement and length of significant pauses within turns (breathing intervals of any length or silences longer than approximately 400 milliseconds). We then ad...

Pausing in speech allows a speaker to plan for the upcoming utterance, as well as to indicate to the listener finality of utterance. In this paper I examine pause patterning and IPU length in two typologically distinct Australian languages; Dalabon and Kayardild. Results show that Dalabon prefers considerably longer stretches of continuous speech than Kayardild. Preliminary findings reveal that...