Analysis of occurrence probability and duration of sentence-medial pauses in English readout speech for L2 English speakers compared to L1 English speakers

Abstract

Pause plays important roles for the intelligibility, naturalness and fluency of speech. In order to get the fluency on target language, it is necessary for a speaker to put pause at appropriate place. This paper describes a comparative study of occurrence probability and duration of sentence-medial pauses in English readout speech of native (L1) American English and native (L1) Bengali speakers. The study indicates that nonnative (L2) (L1 Bengali) English speakers' tendency to insert more number of sentence medial pauses than that of L1 English speakers. This is due to improper phrasing during the utterance planning of L2 English speakers. Results of this analysis also show that the occurrence probability and duration of sentence-medial pause are linearly dependent on l (phrase length) and d (distance) for both speaker groups. But in case of L2 English speakers, the occurrence probability and duration of sentence-medial pause is much higher compared to L1 English speakers.