A realization of pauses in utterance across speech style, gender, and generation*

Abstract

This paper dealt with how realization of pauses in utterance is affected by speech style, gender, and generation. For this purpose, we analyzed the frequency and duration of pauses. Pauses were categorized into four types: pause with breath, pause with no breath, utterance medial pause, and utterance final pause. Forty-eight subjects living in Seoul were chosen from the Korean Standard Speech Database. All subjects engaged in reading and spontaneous speech, through which we could also compare the realization between the two speech styles. The results showed that utterance final pauses had longer durations than utterance medial pauses. It means that utterance final pause has a function that signals the end of an utterance to the audience. For difference between tasks, spontaneous speech had longer and more frequent pauses because of cognitive reasons. With regard to gender variables, women produced shorter and less frequent pauses. For male speakers, the duration of pauses with breath was significantly longer. Finally, for generation variable, older speakers produced more frequent pauses. In addition, the results showed several interaction effects. Male speakers produced longer pauses, but this gender effect was more prominent at the utterance final position.

Pauses Of Hesitation-Semantizers In Students’ Foreign Spontaneous Emotional Speech

“…The peculiarities of pauses realized in spontaneous speech have become a question that interests scholars in different spheres. They focus on functional semantic types of pauses and the cognitive mechanisms that explain them (Betz & Kosmala, 2019;Jakovleva, 2016;Pistono et al, 2019), psychological, physiological and social factors that determine the peculiarities of the realization of pauses (Silber-Varod, Kreiner, Lovett, Levi-Belz, & Amir, 2016;Yoo & Shin, 2019;Zhabin & Molokanova, 2018), the perception of pauses by the listener (Kim & Jang, 2019;Wu, Zhou, & Chen, 2019), pauses as an objective parameter of evaluating the level of foreign language proficiency, also as compared to one's first language (Al-Ghazali & Alrefaee, 2019;Galaktionova, 2008;Kosmala, Candea, & Morgenstern, 2019;Riazantseva, 2001), universal and language-specific strategies of pausation in different languages (Fägersten, 2005;Hurshudyan, 2006), annotating of unplanned pauses and other conversational failures in spoken language corpuses (Podlesskaya & Kibrik, 2007) and their identification during automatic signal processing (Comeaux, & Thomson, 2019;Verkhodanova & Shapranov, 2016), and other aspects.…”