The effect of intrasentence pause on the articulation rate of prepausal and postpausal utterances

Abstract

This study examined the effect of intrasentence pause on the temporal organization of the utterances both preceding and following the pause. Japanese sentences, consisting of six phrases (‘‘bunsetsu’’) with a possible pause location after the third phrase, were produced (1) without any intrasentence pause (NoP condition), (2) with a short pause (ShP condition), and (3) with a normal-length pause (NrP condition). The articulation rate (mora/s) for each phrase in the ShP and NrP conditions was normalized with respect to the articulation rate for the corresponding phrase in the NoP condition for the purpose of comparison. For the ShP and NrP conditions, the phrase immediately preceding the intrasentence pause showed a notable decrease in articulation rate compared with the NoP condition (approx. 10%), while the sentence initial and final phrases showed slight increase in articulation rate (approx. 5%), suggesting that pause insertion is not a localized speech event but that it involves the temporal reorganization of the utterance as a whole. The difference in pause conditions was reflected consistently in the amount of articulation rate decrease in the prepausal phrase, the normal-length pause accompanying a greater articulation rate decrease than the short pause.