Location Of Pauses Research Articles

Fluency issues in L2 academic presentations: Linguistic, cognitive and psychological influences on pausing behaviour

Fluency is usually defined in relation to temporal features such as speed of delivery and pauses, and such features are generally the focus of research on fluency. The reasons why pauses occur, however, have received much less attention. This study first explores the distribution and location of pauses in short academic presentations given by students as part of an English for academic purposes (EAP) course at an Australian university. This data is then used to investigate the reasons for a sample of those pauses, using the researchers’ interpretations, followed by student explanations in stimulated recall interviews (SRIs). The main findings provide confirmation that the location and the reasons for those pauses which are likely to affect the fluency of the presentations are a result not only of linguistic and cognitive issues, but also of psychological factors. The results underline the importance of taking all of these factors into account in EAP programmes by encouraging student awareness of their pausing behaviour, its causes, the effect on their audience, and of strategies for dealing with psycholinguistic, as well as linguistic and cognitive issues. The results confirm the value of SRI as a technique in exploring assumptions about the reasons for pauses, and the limitation of focusing solely on statistical analyses of pausing phenomena.

Pausing behavior of late bilingual and monolingual English speakers

This study examined the differences in the pausing behavior between native and non-native English speakers. Specifically, it examined the location and duration of pauses in relation to the syntactic and lexical complexity of the clauses in which these pauses occur and the nature of the prosodic phrasing of the utterances containing pauses. Speech samples from 10 native (L1) English and 10 Mandarin non-native English speakers from the Archive of L1 and L2 Scripted and Spontaneous Transcripts and Recordings (ALLSSTAR) were included in the analysis. The results showed that lower-level prosodic boundaries and syntactically complex phrases were associated with significantly longer pause duration in the L2 speech. Additionally, phrases with less frequent words tended to induce longer pauses. These findings suggest that insufficient knowledge of the L2 syntax, lexicon, and prosody might determine the location and duration of pauses and ultimately affect the speech fluency of L2 speakers.

Single-Molecule Fluorescence Microscopy in Sensory Cilia of Living Caenorhabditis elegans.

Intracellular transport of organelles and biomolecules is vital for several cellular processes. Single-molecule fluorescence microscopy can illuminate molecular aspects of the dynamics of individual biomolecules that remain unresolved in ensemble experiments. For example, studying single-molecule trajectories of moving biomolecules can reveal motility properties such as velocity, diffusivity, location and duration of pauses, etc. We use single-molecule imaging to study the dynamics of microtubule-based motor proteins and their cargo in the primary cilia of living C. elegans. To this end, we employ standard fluorescent proteins, an epi-illuminated, widefield fluorescence microscope, and primarily open-source software. This chapter describes the setup we use, the preparation of samples, a protocol for single-molecule imaging in primary cilia of C. elegans, and data analysis.

Investigating the relation between L2 pauses, syntactic complexity, and pause location: Longitudinal data from L2-Spanish study-abroad learners

Inverse relations, or ‘trade-off effects’, are a common outcome of interlanguage development: a learner may increase performance in one linguistic domain while simultaneously decreasing performance in another. In this study, we investigate the relationships between one aspect of fluency (pause usage) and two aspects of syntactic complexity (utterance length and subordination) in relation to the location of pauses (between-clause or within-clause) in second-language (L2) oral narratives. The longitudinal analysis is based on monologic data produced by 16 English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish who participated in a seven-week study-abroad program in Spain. Overall, the learners decreased their silent-pause rate over the course of the program while concurrently increasing their number of syntactically complex clauses. Notably, the data suggest a systematic trade-off between pausing and complexity: the learners consistently produced more pauses (i.e. decreased fluency performance) during the elocution of the most complex clauses involving clausal subordination (i.e. increased complexity performance) in comparison to utterances lacking such subordination. We contextualize the findings within models of oral production and discuss how this research generates new insight into the processing factors that modulate pause usage in L2 speech.

Non-native speaker pause patterns closely correspond to those of native speakers at different speech rates.

When speaking a foreign language, non-native speakers can typically be readily identified by their accents. But which aspects of the speech signal determine such accents? Speech pauses occur in all languages but may nonetheless vary in different languages with regard to their duration, number or positions in the speech stream, and therefore are one potential contributor to foreign speech production. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate whether non-native speakers pause ‘with a foreign accent’. We recorded native English speakers and non-native speakers of German or Serbo-Croatian with excellent English reading out an English text at three different speech rates, and analyzed their vocal output in terms of number, duration and location of pauses. Overall, all non-native speakers were identified by native raters as having non-native accents, but native and non-native speakers made pauses that were similarly long, and had similar ratios of pause time compared to total speaking time. Furthermore, all speakers changed their pausing behavior similarly at different speech rates. The only clear difference between native and non-native speakers was that the latter made more pauses than the native speakers. Thus, overall, pause patterns contributed little to the acoustic characteristics of speakers’ non-native accents, when reading aloud. Non-native pause patterns might be acquired more easily than other aspects of pronunciation because pauses are perceptually salient and producing pauses is easy. Alternatively, general cognitive processing mechanisms such as attention, planning or memory may constrain pausing behavior, allowing speakers to transfer their native pause patterns to a second language without significant deviation. We conclude that pauses make a relatively minor contribution to the acoustic characteristics of non-native accents.

Interpretive properties of recitation in the vocalist’s performing arts

Interpretive properties of recitation in the vocalist’s performing arts

The Effects of Pauses on the Listening Process of Japanese EFL Learners

In order to survey the effects of pause on EFL learners’ listening comprehension, two experiments were conducted. The purpose of Experiment 1 is to examine the influence of the following three parameters: (1) The grammatical complexity of the sentence; (2) the location of silent pauses; and (3) the frequency of pauses within the sentence. The results of the experiment show the following effects of pause on listening comprehension: (1) Listeners achieved higher scores when listening to sentences with one pause, two pauses, and no pause, respectively. (2) The shortest sentence (7 syllables in length) with no pause inserted was the hardest to perceive for the EFL listeners. That is, sentence length does not seem to have much effect on perception. (3) The score of sentences which have longer subjects (noun phrase+propositional phrase) was lower than in other sentences with different grammatical constructions. (4) The listening score increased for words immediately followed by a pause. The purpose of Experiment 2 is to analyze the effects that pause length have on Japanese EFL learners’ listening performance. The result shows that pause length does not affect the overall listening process except for in cases of a certain sentence type. The above findings lead us to conclude that one pause in a sentence of 9 to 14 syllables in length facilitates learner’s listening process regardless with the length of each pause.

DESCRIBING COGNITIVE DECLINE THROUGH A PICTURE DESCRIPTION WRITING TASK

To describe cognitive decline, a large variety of neuropsychological tests are available. Linguistic processing is an important factor in some of these tests because language disturbances might serve as a strong indicator for an underlying neurodegenerative disorder, such as Alzheimer's disease. However, the current instruments for language assessment mainly focus on product measures, ignoring the importance of the process that leads to written or spoken language production. In this study, we aim to describe and test writing differences between healthy and cognitively impaired elderly on the basis of a selection of product and process variables. The latter are mainly related to pause times, because the number, length and location of pauses characterize writing fluency and flow. As a consequence, they are proven to reveal traces of the complexity of underlying cognitive processes. We matched fifteen cognitively impaired patients (10 patients with mild cognitive impairment and 5 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease) with fifteen cognitively healthy elderly for gender and age. Our research involved two copy and two picture description tasks. Both tasks were logged with Inputlog, a keystroke logging tool that allowed us to log and time stamp keystroke activity to reconstruct and describe text production processes. Preliminary analysis showed some promising results for cognitive effort related to word production in a written task. We used mixed effects models that included participants as a random effect and word categories as a fixed effect. Our presentation will focus on both product and process measures. Results associated with the process leading to a final text will mainly focus on pause times. For instance, cognitively impaired patients pause longer than healthy controls before, within and after words. Neuropsychological tests that assess language production based on patients' writing processes could be used for assessing cognitive decline in the future. As will be illustrated in our presentation, analyses already revealed a number of key variables that could distinguish cognitively impaired from healthy elderly. Hence, this points to a set of predefined and strictly controlled product and process aspects as important criteria for improving the current task design.

Fluency in monologic and dialogic task performance: Challenges in defining and measuring L2 fluency

AbstractThe study reported in this paper challenges current models of measuring second language fluency by comparing monologic versus dialogic task performance, and providing a novel insight into the measurement of the interactive aspects of dialogic performance. The data that constitute 35 monologic and dialogic task performances from second language learners were coded using a battery of established measures known to tap different aspects of fluency, and subjected to statistical analysis to test for overlaps or differences. Interactive aspects of fluency in dialogue, e. g. interruptions, overlap and unclaimed between turn pauses were also investigated to compare with common measures of monologic speech. While the results confirm previous research findings suggesting that performance is in general statistically more fluent in a dialogue in terms of speed, length of pause and repair measures, they indicate that performances in the two modes are not different in terms of number and location of pauses. The analysis of the dialogues indicates that the decisions researchers make about measuring the interactive aspects of fluency would have an impact on the outcome of measurements of fluency. These findings highlight the need for developing a more systematic and reliable approach to measuring second language (L2) fluency.

Free, Verse, Rhythm

FREE VERSE VERSUS RHYTHM Take this very sentence, for example. Read it a few times. Read it again. Does it have rhythm? Or, put differently, is there a (legitimate?) way to read it that can expose the that it has, or give it rhythm? Does it come down to performance? Could the act of lineating this sentence grant it rhythm? Could some linguistic or cultural context used to frame this sentence give it rhythm? If we knew that it was taken from a poem deemed to be metrical, would we be more inclined to find or make it rhythmical? Of course a large part of the answers to these questions would come down to our definition of rhythm, rightly described in a parenthetical aside by T. V. F. Brogan as surely the vaguest term in criticism (1068). Taking the road most travelled by, we would probably focus on syllables; given that the sentence is in English, we would be attentive to the distribution of stressed and unstressed ones. Although any sequence of words can technically be scanned for stresses and slacks, one is often searching for some recurrence or patterning. Indeed, a typical description of refers to things such as regularity, repetition, expectations, and pattern. (1) Finding such recurrences, under certain conditions which themselves are subject to debate, can salvage the line (is this a line?) from nonrhythmicity or arrhythmia. When the recurrence is palpable and recognizable enough, we would probably place the line within metricity, and therefore certainly within rhythmicity. In fact, and meter, at least within literary prosody and pedagogy, are so commonly linked, and the focus of prosodic study on the cases of meter is so dominant, that it is not a trivial matter to think of outside a metrical context. Take, for example, Philip Hobsbaum: is a blueprint; is the inhabited building. Metre is a skeleton; is the functioning body. Metre is a map; is a land (7). These metaphors convey both the connection and the distinction between the two terms: whereas the metrical pattern is a deep-structure defining feature of the verse line, is what is fleshed out in the phenomenology of the specific line. Yvor Winters makes the same point when he writes that, though the two terms are often confused, Meter is the arithmetical norm, and rhythm is controlled departure from that norm (133). (2) G. S. Fraser writes that a of lines of the same metrical pattern, a succession of pentameters, for instance, is rather like the succession of waves breaking on the shore. Each has a similar pattern ... but none is absolutely identical with any other (2). Two lines of pentameter, then, are identical metrically, but may still differ rhythmically. Traditional foot-substitution approaches capture part of the flexibility and enormous rhythmic variations between the two lines of pentameter (e.g., trochaic substitution, truncated foot, extrametrical syllable). (3) Variation is also elegantly captured by generative prosody, which aims to delineate the contours of the boundary between the metrical and nonmetrical. The number and location of in-line pauses (caesuras and breaks), as features not captured by simple scansion, also contribute to rhythmic variation. In addition, the difference between the two pentameter lines could reside in relative degrees of stress, since iambic typically means any foot in which the first syllable is somehow less stressed than the second. Using a more elaborate system of degrees of stress (like Trager and Smith's system that utilizes four such degrees) would expose differences between the two lines. Thus, in much of the thinking that is represented by the foregoing, and meter are interdependent. Understanding meter as a case of rhythmic regularity, or as a controlled departure from a metrical base, offers a conveniently simplified way to discuss and to combat its daunting vagueness. …

Modeling Pauses for Synthesis of Storytelling Style Speech Using Unsupervised Word Features

Abstract In the storytelling style speech pauses or phrase breaks play a significant role in introducing suspense and climax in the story. More often pauses are provided by a storyteller to capture the audience's attention by emphasizing keywords, focusing emotion-salient words, and to separate key phrases in an utterance. The goal of the work presented in this paper is to predict the location of pauses, in an utterance synthesized by a Story Text-To-Speech (TTS) system using unsupervised features at word-level. Traditional methods for predicting pauses uses the foremost linguistic features like Parts-of-Speech (POS) tags, chunking information or terminal syllables, etc. These methods presuppose the availability of linguistic knowledge by an automatic tagger or manually annotated corpus. However, this information's are not readily available in case of Indian Languages. Manually annotating the text with this linguistic information is quite hectic and time consuming. Also, these pieces of information's do not capture the co-occurrence statistics of words. Hence, we propose a framework for integrating the Story TTS with proposed pause prediction module. In this module, an unlabeled text corpus is used to extract, the continuous-valued world-level features to model the pause patterns in storytelling speech. A set of story-specific (SS) features are introduced for capturing story-semantic information based on pause pattern. A various combination of pause predictions systems is- proposed such as B, POS, U, POS+SS and U+SS. These systems are evaluated objectively by F-1 Score.

Quality metric to assess video streaming service over TCP considering temporal location of pauses

There is a wide range of video services over complex transmission networks, and in some cases end users fail to receive an acceptable quality level. In this paper, the different factors that degrade users' quality of experience (QoE) in video streaming service that use TCP as transmission protocol are studied. In this specific service, impairment factors are: number of pauses, their duration and temporal location. In order to measure the effect that each temporal segment has in the overall video quality, subjective tests. Because current subjective test methodologies are not adequate to assess video streaming over TCP, some recommendations are provided here. At the application layer, a customized player is used to evaluate the behavior of player buffer, and consequently, the end user QoE. Video subjective test results demonstrate that there is a close correlation between application parameters and subjective scores. Based on this fact, a new metrics named VsQM is defined, which considers the importance of temporal location of pauses to assess the user QoE of video streaming service. A useful application scenario is also presented, in which the metrics proposed herein is used to improve video services.

Speech timing and pausing in children with specific language impairment

Articulation rate, speaking rate, as well as the duration and location of pauses, were analysed in 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and a comparison group of seven younger children producing utterances of similar lengths. Children with SLI were significantly slower in articulation rate, but not speaking rate or pausing time, indicating a group difference attributable to longer syllable duration. The correlation between the duration of the pause preceding a child's speaking turn and the length of the subsequent child utterance was calculated as an indication of children's use of the pause for planning the utterance. The correlation was not significant in either group, and not significantly different between groups. An analysis of the position of pauses within speaking turns showed more syllables following than preceding the pause, with no significant group differences. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Influence of Duration and Location of Pauses on Comprehension of a Temporarily Ambiguous Utterance in Adults

Despite the important influence of prosody on comprehension, it remains unclear how the individual parameters of prosody contribute to the process. Therefore, this study examined the magnitude of one prosodic cue, duration of the pause, that precipitates comprehension when the pause is located either early or late in an ambiguous phrase. Adults between the ages of 20 and 40 years (men: M = 27.9, SD = 4.1, women: M = 26.2, SD = 3.7) listened to a series of phrases and made a decision regarding the meaning of each phrase. Analysis of variance for repeated measures yielded main effects of location and duration of pause with an interaction of location by duration. When the pause was located early in the phrase, a longer pause was needed before adults selected the correct meaning. However, when the pause was located later in the phrase, a pause of much shorter duration was sufficient for accurate selection of the intended meaning. A difference in pause duration of 175 msec. was found between the two locations studied.

Pausal behavior of end-users in online searching

This research used an information processing approach to analyze the pausal behavior of end-users. It is based on viewing the search as a series of actions and pauses (rests). The end-users are 41 students and 3 faculty. After instructions, subjects searched through the semester, doing 79 searches. This study identified reasons for pausing, location of pauses, hesitation rate and pausal behavior changes over time. This study confirms that the searchers pauses less frequently and for shorter periods as they progressed through searches with more experience and practice, searchers moved more smoothly online, and the hesitation rate decreased over time. Over a series of searches or cycles within long searches, searchers gradually began to chunk more information between pauses. However, the duration of pauses do not vary significantly over time.

Asymmetric distribution of pause transfer sequences in apolipoprotein B-100

Lipoprotein assembly requires a complex and regulated set of events that includes apolipoprotein B (apoB) translocation across the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane, folding, and association with lipids. Unlike simple secretory proteins which are cotranslationally translocated directly into the ER lumen, nascent apoB contains pause transfer (PT) sequences that direct the transient stopping and subsequent restarting of its translocation, a phenomenon termed translocational pausing. During one particular translocational pause in apoB, the ribosome-membrane junction and ER translocation channel have been shown to be altered in such a way as to expose the nascent polypeptide to the cytosol and direct a change in the proteins neighboring the nascent chain. In this study, we have experimentally identified the location and distribution of the translocational pauses that are present throughout apoB-100. We find that pause transfer sequences are distributed asymmetrically, clustering in three distinct domains: a) nine functional PT sequences appear in the amino terminal 20% of apoB, b) four more PT sequences occur just before the end of apoB-48, and c) an additional ten PT sequences are found between apoB-65-95. These clusters are interrupted by two lipid binding regions of approximately 100 kD each in which no PT sequences occur. The implications of this asymmetric distribution of PT sequences, and their correlation with previously hypothesized structural and functional domains of apoB, are discussed.

Post‐hyperventilation apnoea in conscious humans.

1. In nine normal subjects, analysis was performed of the number, length and location of apnoeic pauses during 20 min of recovery following voluntary overbreathing (VHV). Four different rates of recovery of end-tidal PCO2 (PET,CO2), studied in randomized order, were induced by overbreathing to 15 or 25 mmHg, each for 3 or 6 min. Subjects breathed mildly hyperoxic gas mixtures (inspired PO2 approximately 250 mmHg) to and fro into an open circuit via a mouthpiece and pneumotachograph. 2. Apnoeic pauses rarely occurred immediately after the end of VHV but gradually increased in number and length. When averaged across all subjects and protocols, the largest pauses occurred 2.0 +/- 0.3 min (S.D.; range 1.6-2.4 min) after the end of VHV. Based on a definition of apnoea as expiratory time greater than 6 s, apnoeas occurred between mean times of 0.8 and 5.6 min after the end of VHV, the end of this period being associated with a mean PET,CO2 value of 36.4 mmHg, which was below the initial mean resting value of 39.8 mmHg. 3. Within this apnoeic period, 80% of experiments produced apnoeas of less than 10 s duration, 61% of between 10 and 20 s duration and 42% of between 20 and 30 s duration. Only one out of nine subjects consistently failed to show apnoeas. 4. The range of lengths of individual apnoeas and the number per minute were independent of the length and level of VHV and were not significantly different between the four protocols. 5. The number and length of apnoeas did not change in repeated runs in each subject. We were not able to confirm previous reports that apnoeas occurred more frequently in subjects familiar with the experiment. 6. These results reconciled previous studies showing either apnoea or hyperpnoea following voluntary overbreathing in conscious humans. They showed an initial period of heightened breathing lasting about a minute with few apnoeas, consistent with 'after-discharge'. Beyond that, apnoeas occurred as an 'all-or-nothing' phenomenon as long as PET,CO2 was on average less than 3.4 mmHg below resting PET,CO2. The occurrence and length of apnoeas was consistent in individual subjects with no evidence of a learning effect.

The Processing of Musical Prosody by Musical and Nonmusical Children

The surface structures of music and speech should coincide in musical prosody. Two processing systems have thus to be integrated, one devoted to the surface structure of speech, the other to that of music. This article is in two parts: a review of data on speech and music production and hearing, and two experimental studies on the synchronization between a rhythm and spoken sounds. In the first part, a comparison between some intensity and timing parameters that characterize the unfolding of spoken strings and of musical sequences is presented. Data from studies on performers (speakers, musicians) and listeners are compared with regard to spontaneous rates, location and duration of pauses, duration of sounds, and periodic occurrence of accents. In the second part, the ability to control the correspondence between taps and words is examined. Two experimental studies on 6-year-old children focus on the role of musical training. The reproductions of simple rhythms and simple sentences or onomatopoeias were analyzed as well as the coordination between a rhythmic sequence of taps and a spoken string. Young musicians succeeded better than nonmusicians of the same age in the synchronization between their verbal production and their motor accompaniment, mainly because they more markedly anticipated the musical string in which they integrated the spoken sounds subsequently. The results are discussed in relation to the acoustic, motor, and cognitive processes involved in the coordination of the two temporal strings.

Pausing in the speech of deaf young adults

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.

Effects of experience on radio language performance

Beginning broadcasting students, university broadcasters, and professional broadcasters read a radio newscast and editorial under simulated broadcast conditions. Levels of broadcast experience and speech tasks were distinguished by the frequency, duration, and location of silent pauses (SPs), and by speech rate and fluency measures. The distinctive performance of professionals versus nonprofessionals was discussed with respect to broadcasting prescriptions, psycholinguistic theories of “ideal delivery” and “cognitive rhythm,” and the functional implications of their broadcast performance. Greater broadcast experience was reflected by smaller newscast SP duration and SP frequency, and by slower editorial speech rate. Professionals altered more often and with greater fluency the newscast text, but refrained from changing the editorial text. Also, the professionals were distinguished on both speech tasks by more syntactic SPs, more fluent syllables, and fewer speech errors. Finally, performance differences b...