Abstract
The present study investigated the durational characteristics of sentence-medial and sentence-final pauses in the production of a paragraph, with an aim to elucidate the factors that determine the durational organization of connected speech. A phonetically trained native speaker of Japanese read a paragraph consisting of eight sentences at a moderate speaking rate. Three recordings varying slightly in total duration — roughly 55 s, 52 s (−5%), and 49s (−10%) — were analyzed acoustically. Results showed that approximately 30% of the paragraph duration was pause duration, of which about 80% was sentence-final and 20% sentence-medial. Pause duration affected paragraph duration more significantly than speech duration, e.g., 10% shortening in paragraph duration resulted from 25% shortening in pause duration but only 5% shortening in speech duration. The duration of sentence-medial pauses was positively correlated to the duration of preceding speech, while the duration of sentence-final pauses reflected the internal structure of the paragraph, i.e., paragraph-internal topic transitions were accompanied by longer pauses, possibly providing opportunities, too, for physiological adjustments such as breathing and swallowing. The ratio of accumulated pause duration to accumulated speech duration increased in an asymptotic manner, approaching the final ratio value near the end of paragraph production.
Published Version
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