Occurrence and Duration of Pauses in Relation to Speech Tempo and Structural Organization in Two Speech Genres

Abstract

Pauses act as important acoustic cues to prosodic phrase boundaries. However, the distribution and phonetic characteristics of pauses have not yet been fully described either cross-linguistically or in different genres and speech styles within languages. The current study examines the pausal performance of 24 Czech speakers in two genres of read speech: news reading and poetry reciting. The pause rate and pause duration are related to genre differences, overt and covert text organization, and speech tempo. We found a significant effect of several levels of text organization, including a strong effect of punctuation. This was reflected in both measures of pausal performance. A grammatically informed analysis of a subset of pauses within the smallest units revealed a significant contribution for pause rate only. An effect of tempo was found in poetry reciting at a macro level (speaker averages) but not when pauses were observed individually. Genre differences did not manifest consistently and analogically for the two measures. The findings provide evidence that pausing is used systematically by speakers in read speech to convey not only prosodic phrasing but also text structure, among other things.

How to pause in charismatic speeches: A case study of Barack Obama

“…In acoustic studies of political speech and speakers, Duez already observed in 1982 that the more uninterrupted, monologue-like and pre-planned the speaking context is, the greater the duration of pauses [4]. Public speeches can therefore be expected to feature relatively long pauses, and news readings to have on average shorter pauses than poetry recitations, which is indeed in accord with recent evidence provided by [5]. Fifteen years later, Duez added to her findings that, with increasing authority and social standing, the pauses speakers make in their speeches become longer and more frequent [1].…”

“…This difference in variation magnitude is also significant according to a supplementary F test (F[45,35]= 2.656, p=0.004). Furthermore, Obama's pause durations -even those of the MM pauses -are overall remarkably long, as is illustrated by the histogram in Figure 8, compared to a histogram we created after the data of silent pauses in other speaker's read speech performances from the study of Campione & Véronis [6]; see also the overview provided by Heldner & Edlund [58] and the study of Sturn & Volin [5], who report similar pause-duration distributions (and mean values for silent intervals of about 480-530 ms) both for news readings and poetry recitations. In all above mentioned previous studies, pauses > 2,000ms are "exotic" insofar as they represent less than 5% of the respective data sample.…”

“…However, the violin plot in Figure 7 also shows that the difference, although relatively large compared to pause categories in other studies (cf. [5,6]), is by no means categorical in nature. This is especially due to the MM pauses whose durational variability is about twice as big (s = 924 ms) as that of the PM pauses (s= 567 ms).…”

“…An important implication of this statement is that, although there are pauses > 1,000 ms, they are extremely rare and hardly ever form a pronounced separate peak in a distributional analysis of pause durations, even for genres like news reading and poetry recitation. Figure 1 from Volin & Sturm [5] illustrates that.…”

“…The former French president Francois Mitterrand, for example, used shorter and fewer pauses in his speeches as a challenger and opponent, i.e., before he came to power, than in his later presidential speeches. More recently, Sturm & Volin [5] showed that pause durations can also vary depending on the speaker's tempo, particularly for uninterrupted, monologue-like and pre-planned speeches. The faster speakers talk in such speeches, the fewer pauses they make -and there is an additional tendency for the overall number of pauses to decrease.…”