COGNITIVE ROLE OF SPEECH PAUSES AND ALGORITHMIC CONSIDERATIONS FOR THEIR PROCESSING

Abstract

This study investigates pausing strategies, focusing the attention on empty speech pauses. A cross-modal analysis (video and audio) of spontaneous narratives produced by male and female children and adults showed that a remarkable amount of empty speech pauses was used to signal new concepts in the speech flow and to segment discourse units such as clauses and paragraphs. Based on these results, an adaptive mathematical model for pause distribution was suggested, that exploits, as pause features, the absence of signal and/or the changes of energy over different acoustic dimensions strongly related to the auditory perception. These considerations inspired the formulation and the implementation of two pause detection procedures that proved to be more effective than the Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) and Long-Term Spectral Divergence (LTSD) algorithms recently proposed in literature and applied for Voice Activity Detection (VAD).