Laws for pauses.

Abstract

It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the observation that these pauses are expressive, they give speech momentum and rhythm, and most importantly, their durations reflect temporal discrimination-they are not produced by articulatory constraints. The theory is formulated in terms of a leaky integrator differential equation that is intended to model the sense of time passage that occurs during relatively brief pauses. The theory predicts that if the decay time scale associated with the leakage term includes body size as a parameter, then allometry will be observed generally in the amount of silence people deploy in pause behavior. A second study tested the theory on a class of long pauses defined by being terminated by a speech gesture indicating speaker recognition that the pause was indeed long. These long pauses were also found to obey allometry. The exponents derived from power law models of mean pause duration in both studies were found to be significantly larger than those associated with allometries of body energy expenditure. These findings provide a new meaning to the embodiment of cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).