Prosodic planning: Effects of phrasal length and complexity on pause duration

Abstract

AbstractResearch 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 prosodic structure and phrase length on pause duration are reported. Subjects read sentences varying along t…