The Significance of Empty Speech Pauses: Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues

Abstract

This study investigates pausing strategies, focusing attention on empty speech pauses. A cross-modal analysis (video and audio) of spontaneous narratives produced by male and female children (9 years old ± 3 months) and adults showed that a remarkable amount of empty speech pauses (91% in male and 84% in female children, and 95% in adults of both sexes) was related to the amount of added information conveyed in the speech flow. Both adults and children consistently exploited pausing strategies to signal discourse boundaries such as clauses (marked by empty speech pauses for 73% and 70% of cases in male and female children, respectively, and 56% in adults) and paragraphs (97% and 96% in male and female children, respectively, and 94% in adults). The high consistency, among subjects, in the distribution of speech pauses suggests that, at least in the Italian context, the speaker in narration makes use of an intrinsic timing behavior, probably a general pattern of rules, to control speech flow for discourse organization. The implications of these findings for the development of improved speech recognition and speech synthesis systems are discussed and procedures for the automatic detection of speech pauses are proposed.