Temporal relationship between pause and utterance durations in speech of short sentence

Abstract

In this paper we focused on a pause in speech, and analyzed the factors affecting pause duration. It has been considered that utterance duration just before the pause is the only factor affecting pause duration (preboundary effect), recently effect of utterance duration just after the pause has also been noticed (postboundary effect). However, the relation between two utterance durations and pause duration sandwiched by the durations (pre-post boundary effect) has not been analyzed. Therefore we analyzed these factors inclusively, by using a simple sentence (XY sentence) consisting of two words in speech experiment. Then we used two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) for analyzing the contribution of factors, which were the utterance duration of these words. As a result, we found two factors affecting a pause. One is utterance duration just before the pause which was already observed, and the other is the ratio of prior and posterior utterance duration. These results suggest that not only a pre or postboundary effect but also a pre-postboundary effect exist in speech.