Silent Pauses Research Articles

Linguistic-phonetic characteristics of cluttering across different speaking styles: a pilot study from Hungarian

In this study, we investigated the language of Hungarian speakers who clutter (PWCs) in four speaking styles (spontaneous speech, storytelling, deliberately slowed-down speech and giving a talk). The aim of the study was to show the effects of the different speaking styles on the linguistic and acoustic-phonetic patterns of the PWCs’ speech. Grammatical complexity was analyzed in the four speaking styles using a language-specific codification system. The duration and the number of silent pauses and hesitations were measured in order to define both the speech and articulation tempi. The disfluencies and the phonological variability of the words were also analyzed in the four speaking styles. The results supported the view that speaking styles affect the linguistic and phonetic characteristics of cluttering. We found differences in all parameters across speaking styles. These results confirmed our assumption that PWCs are able (1) to express their thoughts using the expected grammatical forms and (2) to articulate similarly to normal speakers. Our results provide more information for better and more precise understanding of cluttering.

Reducing the Interval Between Volume Acquisitions Improves “Sparse” Scanning Protocols in Event-related Auditory fMRI

Sparse and clustered-sparse temporal sampling fMRI protocols have been devised to reduce the influence of auditory scanner noise in the context of auditory fMRI studies. Here, we report an improvement of the previously established clustered-sparse acquisition scheme. The standard procedure currently used by many researchers in the field is a scanning protocol that includes relatively long silent pauses between image acquisitions (and therefore, a relatively long repetition time or cluster-onset asynchrony); it is during these pauses that stimuli are presented. This approach makes it unlikely that stimulus-induced BOLD response is obscured by scanner-noise-induced BOLD response. It also allows the BOLD response to drop near baseline; thus, avoiding saturation of BOLD signal and theoretically increasing effect size. A possible drawback of this approach is the limited number of stimulus presentations and image acquisitions that are possible in a given period of time, which could result in an inaccurate estimation of effect size (higher standard error). Since this line of reasoning has not yet been empirically tested, we decided to vary the cluster-onset asynchrony (7.5, 10, 12.5, and 15 s) in the context of a clustered-sparse protocol. In this study sixteen healthy participants listened to spoken sentences. We performed whole-brain fMRI group statistics and region of interest analysis with anatomically defined regions of interest (auditory core and association areas). We discovered that the protocol, which included a short cluster-onset asynchrony (7.5 s), yielded more advantageous results than the other protocols, which involved longer cluster-onset asynchrony. The short cluster-onset asynchrony protocol exhibited a larger number of activated voxels and larger mean effect sizes with lower standard errors. Our findings suggest that, contrary to prior experience, a short cluster-onset asynchrony is advantageous because more stimuli can be delivered within any given period of time. Alternatively, a given number of stimuli can be presented in less time, and this broadens the spectrum of possible fMRI applications.

A Preliminary Study on the Function of Silent Pauses in L1 and L2 Speakers of English and German

A Preliminary Study on the Function of Silent Pauses in L1 and L2 Speakers of English and German

Automatic intelligibility assessment of pathologic speech over the telephone

Objective assessment of intelligibility on the telephone is desirable for voice and speech assessment and rehabilitation. A total of 82 patients after partial laryngectomy read a standardized text which was synchronously recorded by a headset and via telephone. Five experienced raters assessed intelligibility perceptually on a five-point scale. Objective evaluation was performed by support vector regression on the word accuracy (WA) and word correctness (WR) of a speech recognition system, and a set of prosodic features. WA and WR alone exhibited correlations to human evaluation between |r| = 0.57 and |r| = 0.75. The correlation was r = 0.79 for headset and r = 0.86 for telephone recordings when prosodic features and WR were combined. The best feature subset was optimal for both signal qualities. It consists of WR, the average duration of the silent pauses before a word, the standard deviation of the fundamental frequency on the entire sample, the standard deviation of jitter, and the ratio of the durations of the voiced sections and the entire recording.

Memória de trabalho e produção oral da linguagem

In this paper, we examine the use of silent pauses made by high and low working memory span individuals, during the reading span test (the Brazilian Portuguese version), aiming at verifying possible strategies used by the subjects in order to accommodate the transient computational and storage demands that occur in the task. Our results are congruent with the idea that language production quality is also influenced by the subjects´ working memory capacity: high span subjects produced more sentences without pause, made shorter pauses, and therefore spent less time reading the test sentences than low span subjects.

Comparison of pausing behavior in children who stutter and children who have Asperger syndrome

Purpose The objective of this research was to compare the number and types of grammatical and non-grammatical silent pauses presented by stutterers and subjects with Asperger syndrome in their narratives. Method Ten children who stutter and four participants with Asperger syndrome (mean ages of both groups 10 years) were assessed at the Speech and Language Disorders Department of the Universidade Federal de São Paulo/Brasil. They narrated a story based on a pre-selected sequence of pictures. They were filmed and their productions were analyzed using version 5.0.47 of Praat ( http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/download_win.html). Silent intervals in the speech that ranged from 0.25 to 4 s were considered pauses. The pauses were classified as grammatical and non-grammatical, depending on the words that preceded and followed them. Results Both groups presented grammatical and non-grammatical pauses and the former predominated. The children with Asperger syndrome produced a greater number of pauses than the stutterers. Educational objectives: The reader will be able to: (1) characterize the use of pauses in the oral narrative; (2) distinguish a grammatical pause from a non-grammatical pause regarding the use and function; (3) recognize the pattern of pause found in the two populations.

Windows on the mind

This paper investigates four different types of pauses in conversational narrative: the filled pauses er and erm, and short and long silent pauses. The study is based on the Narrative Corpus (NC), a recently created corpus of everyday narratives. The texts, which include both the narrative and some context, have been annotated for important textual components. The current analysis reveals that pauses are more frequent in conversational narrative than in general conversation. We suggest three factors that account for this high frequency: (i) the need for narrators, in the opening utterance of the story, to provide specific information to orient listeners to the situation in which the events unfolded, (ii) the need to coordinate narrative clauses to match the story events, and (iii) the preference of narrators to present speech, thought, emotion and gesture using direct-mode discourse presentation, which is more “dramatic” but also more costly in terms of reference resolution.

Language production strategies and disfluencies in multi-clause network descriptions: A study of adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

A prominent behavioral manifestation of impulsivity in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is inappropriate language production, such as talking excessively, blurting out answers, and interrupting others. In this study, we examined language production in ADHD and non-ADHD controls to determine whether these types of language production problems are apparent in adults with ADHD. Participants (18-35 years old, 53.3% male) were asked to describe networks of colored dots that contained two branches that differed in length and complexity. According to the Minimal-Load Principle (Levelt, 1989), participants should prefer to describe a shorter and less complex branch first, in order to minimize planning and memory demands when formulating a description of the network. The dependent measures focused on which branch participants chose to describe first and the fluency of the descriptions. Four types of disfluency were examined: filled pauses, silent pauses, repetitions, and repairs. There was no difference between ADHD participants and controls in the decisions they made when describing the networks (p > .10, η² = .004). Participants in both groups preferred to describe a short branch before describing a long branch and decisions were unaffected by complexity. However, ADHD participants did produce more words overall, t(73) = -2.33, p < .05, η² = .07, and they also produced more disfluencies, F(4, 70) = 2.98, p < .05, η² = .15, even after adjusting for number of words produced. These findings suggest less language efficiency and reduced fluency in ADHD, and that language production issues remain in adults with ADHD, similar to the issues commonly reported in children with ADHD.

The role of silence in interpreted police interviews

Silence is rarely treated as something that should be translated in the interpreting process. Drawing on the principles of conversation analysis, the article explores, the role which silence plays as a meaningful unit in police interviews mediated by Japanese–English interpreters. It also attempts to demonstrate that, despite the status of silence as an ‘uninterpretable’ unit, silent pauses are treated as meaningful units by interpreters. Silent switching pauses were found to function as repair initiators for interpreters, prompting self-repair of renditions. The analysis also reveals that, through the management of silent pauses before and after the suspect's utterances, interpreters exercise a certain extent of control over the questioning, sharing the power of interrogator with the police officer. On the other hand, there are opportunities for suspects to resist such power through silences once they hold the floor. The ambiguous, ‘untranslatable’ yet ‘interpretable’ nature of silent pauses was found to provide opportunities for participants in interpreted police interviews to break away from the questioning sequence typical of monolingual police interviews.

Pausing preceding and following to in to-infinitives of Obamas G-20 summit speech in London: Read vs spontaneous speech

Research on pausing in read and spontaneous speech has been the concern of researchers in the past few decades. While elicited data reveals that in read speech pauses preceding heads of phrases are produced considerably longer by native speakers of English than pauses following heads in read speech, the situation tends to differ in spontaneous speech. Based on this premise, this study reports on President Obama’s audio recording of the speech he made in the G-20 Summit in London in 2009, thus aiming to describe different silent pausing strategies, as they were employed by the President during his address to an international community. The recordings of both the first part of the speech he made during the opening of his address, assumed as a recitation of previously written text and during question-answer session, when he spontaneously responded to questions of international journalists were measured in milliseconds. Measurement was conducted utilizing Goldwave, the sound analyzing software. Each part was analyzed separately in terms of pauses preceding and following the to particle in to-infinitive phrases, and later, a comparison between the two types, read and spontaneous, was made in order to observe any potential differences/similarities between the two types of speeches. Obtained results display significant differences between pausing preceding and following to in read speech, in that the to particle was kept intact with the infinitive phrase while in spontaneous speech, preceding and following pauses did not display any statistically significant differences in terms of duration. Key words: Pausing, prosody, speech, teaching speaking/reading, principles and parameters theory.

Syntactic and lexical context of pauses and hesitations in the discourse of Alzheimer patients and healthy elderly subjects

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of discourse production. We compared the distribution, the duration and the frequency of speech dysfluencies in the spontaneous discourse of 20 AD patients with 20 age, gender and socio-economically matched healthy peers. We found that patients and controls differ along several lines: patients' discourse displays more frequent silent pauses, which occur more often outside syntactic boundaries and are followed by more frequent words. Overall patients show more lexical retrieval and planning difficulties, but where controls signal their planning difficulties using filled pauses, AD patients do not.

Listener vs. speaker-oriented aspects of speech: Studying the disfluencies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders

This study investigates the role of disfluencies such as "um" or "uh" in conversation to discern whether these features of speech serve listener- or speaker-oriented functions by looking at their occurrence (or lack of occurrence) in the speech of participants with autism. Since the characteristic egocentricity of individuals with autism means they should engage in minimal listener-oriented behavior, they are a useful group to differentiate these functions. Transcription, analysis and categorization of 26 spontaneous language samples were derived from age-matched native English-speaking controls and high-functioning individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Results showed that individuals with ASD produced fewer filled-pause words (ums and uhs) and revisions than controls, but more silent pauses and disfluent repetitions. Filled-pause words therefore appear to be listener-oriented features of speech.

Listening to the sound of silence: disfluent silent pauses in speech have consequences for listeners

Silent pauses are a common form of disfluency in speech yet little attention has been paid to them in the psycholinguistic literature. The present paper investigates the consequences of such silences for listeners, using an Event-Related Potential (ERP) paradigm. Participants heard utterances ending in predictable or unpredictable words, some of which included a disfluent silence before the target. In common with previous findings using er disfluencies, the N400 difference between predictable and unpredictable words was attenuated for the utterances that included silent pauses, suggesting a reduction in the relative processing benefit for predictable words. An earlier relative negativity, topographically distinct from the N400 effect and identifiable as a Phonological Mismatch Negativity (PMN), was found for fluent utterances only. This suggests that only in the fluent condition did participants perceive the phonology of unpredictable words to mismatch with their expectations. By contrast, for disfluent utterances only, unpredictable words gave rise to a late left frontal positivity, an effect previously observed following ers and disfluent repetitions. We suggest that this effect reflects the engagement of working memory processes that occurs when fluent speech is resumed. Using a surprise recognition memory test, we also show that listeners were more likely to recognise words which had been encountered after silent pauses, demonstrating that silence affects not only the process of language comprehension but also its eventual outcome. We argue that, from a listener's perspective, one critical feature of disfluency is the temporal delay which it adds to the speech signal.

Conceptual and empirical relationships between temporal measures of fluency and oral English proficiency with implications for automated scoring

Information provided by examination of the skills that underlie holistic scores can be used not only as supporting evidence for the validity of inferences associated with performance tests but also as a way to improve the scoring rubrics, descriptors, and benchmarks associated with scoring scales. As fluency is considered a critical, perhaps foundational, component of speaking proficiency, temporal measures of fluency are expected to be strongly related to holistic ratings of speech quality.This study examines the relationships among selected temporal measures of fluency and holistic scores on a semi-direct measure of oral English proficiency. The spoken responses of 150 respondents to one item on the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT) were analyzed for selected temporal measures of fluency. The examinees represented three first language backgrounds (Chinese, Hindi, and English) and the range of scores on the OEPT scale. While strong and moderate correlations between OEPT scores and speech rate, speech time ratio, mean length of run, and the number and length of silent pauses were found, fluency variables alone did not distinguish adjacent levels of the OEPT scale. Temporal measures of fluency may reasonably be selected for the development of automated scoring systems for speech; however, identification of an examinee’s level remains dependent on aspects of performance only partially represented by fluency measures.

Perception of prosodic boundaries in spontaneous speech with and without silent pauses.

In speech comprehension, listeners attend to variation in multiple acoustic parameters encoding prosodic structure. Given the multiplicity of acoustic cues, we ask whether prosody perception is dependent on any individual cue or whether acoustic redundancy encoding prosody supports robust prosody perception in the absence of an individual cue. The present paper reports on a study of boundary perception in spontaneous speech with and without silent pause as a boundary cue. Prior studies show that in read speech, silent pause is important for boundary perception, while in spontaneous speech, listeners can detect boundaries without pauses. Our study tests the role of pause in boundary perception with two versions of 36 short speech excerpts from the Buckeye Corpus: one with pauses intact and another with all pauses truncated to 20 ms. In real-time transcription tasks based only on auditory impression, boundary locations were marked by 74 subjects for the intact stimuli and by an additional 15 subjects for truncated excerpts. Inter-transcriber agreement was comparable across the intact and truncated conditions. Paired-sample t-tests show significantly higher rates of boundary perception for intact stimuli indicating that silent pause is an important but not necessary cue to boundary perception and cue redundancy allows for robust perception.

Start-up Rhetoric in Eight Speeches of Barack Obama

Our purpose in the following was to investigate the start-up rhetoric employed by U.S. President Barack Obama in his speeches. The initial 5 min from eight of his speeches from May to September of 2009 were selected for their variety of setting, audience, theme, and purpose. It was generally hypothesized that Barack Obama, widely recognized for the excellence of his rhetorical performance, would pursue both constant and variable strategies in his effort to establish contact with his audience. More specifically, it was hypothesized that the make-up of the audience--primarily native or non-native speakers of English--would be a prominent independent variable. A number of temporal and verbal measures were used as dependent variables. Variations were evident in mean length in syllables and duration in seconds of utterances (articulatory phrases), articulation rate in syllables per second of ontime, mean duration of silent pauses in seconds, and frequency of fillers, hesitations, colloquial words and phrases, introductory phrases, and 1st person singular pronominals. Results indicated that formality versus informality of the setting and presence or absence of a teleprompter were more prominent than native versus non-native audiences. Our analyses confirm Obama's skillfulness in challenging and variable settings and clearly detect orderliness and scientific generalizability in language use. The concept of orality/literacy provides a theoretical background and emphasizes dialogical interaction of audience and speaker.

Cues for Inferring Secrets Held by Others during Social Interactions

Cues for inferring the secrets held by others were investigated by asking 141 undergraduates to respond to an open-ended question about cues used for inferring whether other people were withholding a secret during daily social interactions. Analysis indicated evasion of a topic, silent pauses, and aversion of gaze were common cues for inferring secrets by these undergraduates.

Evaluation of reading skill in third grade children using acoustic analysis

In order to make a detailed observation of some variables in reading performance, two third grade (second series in Brazil) children were selected from a group because their performance differed widely in terms of frequency and type of silent pauses and reading aloud rate. The group was formed by 32 children from 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th grades. And, from an acoustic phonetic analysis of data, we were able to measure the reading aloud rate expressed in VV units per second, as well as observing performance and prosody such as: absolute frequency, duration and type of hesitant and non-hesitant silent pauses; stress group average duration; absolute frequency and duration of VV units per stress group; duration of units comprising the first vowel coming before a silent pause and the same. Statistical analysis suggests that the variable silent pause duration does not seem to differ among the children. However, some aspects like number of VV units per stress group, reading aloud rate, frequency and type of hesitant silent pauses vary a lot and may be important as parameters for reading performance.

Speech face perception is locked to anticipation in speech production

At the beginning of the 90’s, it was definitively demonstrated that as early as the visual speech information is perceivable, speech identification can be processed. Cathiard et al. [Cathiard, M.-A., Tiberghien, G., Tseva, A., Lallouache, M.-T., Escudier, P., 1991. Visual perception of anticipatory rounding during acoustic pauses: a cross-language study. In: Proceedings of the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Aix-en-Provence, France, 4, pp. 50–53] used different V-to-V anticipatory spans, with articulatory measurements, along silent pauses, in a perceptual gating paradigm, and established that up to 200 ms “speech can be seen before it is heard”. These results were later framed into the framework of a general anticipatory control model, the Movement Expansion Model [Abry, C., Lallouache, M.-T., Cathiard, M.-A., 1996]. How can coarticulation models account for speech sensitivity to audio–visual desynchronization? In: Stork, D., Hennecke, M. (Eds.), Speechreading by Humans and Machines, NATO ASI Series F: Computer, Vol. 150. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Tokyo, pp. 247–255]. Surprisingly the timing of the vowel and consonant auditory and visual streams remained until now poorly understood within the typical CVCV span. A first preliminary test was published by Escudier, Benoît and Lallouache [Escudier, P., Benoît, C., Lallouache, M.-T., 1990. Identification visuelle de stimuli associés à l’opposition /i/-/y/: étude statique. Colloque de physique, supplément au n° 2, tome 51, 1er Congrès Français d’Acoustique, C2-541-544]: this is the issue we took up again more than 10 years later. And for the first time we found that “speech can be heard before it is seen”. The main purpose of the present contribution will be to bring new data in order to clear up apparent contradictions, essentially due to misconceptions of variability and lawfulness in speakers’ behavior.

Disfluencies along the garden path: Brain electrophysiological evidence of disrupted sentence processing

Bailey and Ferreira (2003) hypothesized and reported behavioral evidence that disfluencies (filled and silent pauses) undesirably affect sentence processing when they appear before disambiguating verbs in Garden Path (GP) sentences. Disfluencies here cause the parser to “linger” on, and apparently accept as correct, an erroneous parse. Critically, the revision process usually associated with GP-disambiguating verbs does not appear to be triggered. In order to verify this effect, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to disambiguating verbs in spoken GP sentences from 15 adults. A filled pause, silent pause, or no disfluency appeared before the GP-disambiguating verbs. Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that fluent GP sentences elicited P600, an ERP index that revision of the initial parse was attempted. Crucially, P600 was attenuated for sentences containing a filled or silent pause before the GP-disambiguating verb. However, PCA detected an N400-like activation for these items, suggesting that listeners accepted the original (erroneous) parse and continued integrating at the verb; a conclusion that is tentative and requires further study. A left anterior positivity was also detected at GP-disambiguating verbs flanked by a filled pause. Discussion focuses on what these preliminary findings tell us about how oral comprehension proceeds when the time-course of sentence processing is disrupted.