Pausing in the speech of deaf young adults

Abstract

Speech timing in deaf young adults was studied by characterizing the number, duration and location of silent pauses in 32 samples of oral reading at four levels of speech intelligibility. Relationships among timing and intelligibility were examined, and a comparison was made between pausing in utterances produced by deaf and normal-hearing young adults. The results indicated (1) that as the level of speech intelligibility increased speaking rate increased, while the number of pauses and the amount of utterance, pause and filled interval time decreased; (2) that pauses at clause boundaries were significantly longer than those at other locations; and (3) that speech produced by deaf young adults exhibited different temporal characteristics from that of normal-hearing undergraduates. Phonetic and syntactic structure were shown to influence pause location, and articulatory and respiratory factors were hypothesized to have a strong influence on pausing in speech produced by deaf individuals.