Some temporal aspects of spoken discourse

Abstract

A sixteen‐minute “prompted monologue” was produced spontaneously by a male native speaker of English. The last five minutes, during which the speaker spoke without interruption by the prompter, were used for a listening test. Twenty‐five subjects heard a filtered version and an undistorted version of the material, and indicated their perception of sentence and paragraph boundaries by pressing a telegraph key. The percent pre‐boundary lengthening was calculated for perceived sentence and paragraph boundaries within the uninterrupted “turn” as well as for the boundaries of “turns”. The average pre‐boundary lengthening for sentence boundaries and paragraph boundaries within the uninterrupted five‐minute “turn” was 34.0% and 34.4% respectively, while the pre‐boundary lengthening before the end of a “turn” averaged 42.9%. Pauses between sentences averaged 737 ms, those between paragraphs, 1659 ms, and those between “turns”, 5045 ms. While the difference between paragraph terminations and “turn” terminations could be explained on the basis of pause duration as well as difference in degree of lengthening, other factors enter the picture as far as the distinction between sentence and paragraph boundaries within a “turn” is concerned.