Silent Pauses Research Articles

Zooming into the L2 Speech Fluency Markers of Anxious and Non-Anxious Advanced L2 Learners – an Extreme Case Sampling Report

The study examines selected temporal markers of L2 utterance fluency in the speech of advanced L2 learners who exhibit high (HLA) and low (LLA) language anxiety levels. Out of the pool of 59 participants, six HLA and six LLA individuals were selected for an in-depth analysis on the basis of their scores on the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (the FLCAS) (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986). Speech samples from a monologue task were examined for selected L2 utterance fluency measures: filled (FP) and silent pause (SP) frequency, mean length of silent pause (MLSP), articulation rate (AR), speech rate (SR), and mean length of run (MLR). The results provided insights into the L2 speech fluency profiles of anxious and non-anxious individuals. The analysis disclosed relatively higher frequency and disparate application of FPs, slower speed of speech, and more varied profiles in MLR in the HLA group as compared to the LLA group. The findings yield pedagogical and methodological implications.

AN ANALYSIS OF PAUSE AND SLIP OF THE TONGUE IN ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDENTS OF UNMA BANTEN

Speech errors can happen to everyone in every activity. This is inseparable from the world of education, one of which is microteaching activities. In its implementation in the English Education Study Program at Mathla'ul Anwar University Banten, there were several pauses and slips of the tongue that occurred. This research uses a qualitative approach. This research method is descriptive-qualitative. The data collection methods in this study involved observation, documentation, and checklists. In this study, the researchers conducted an obtrusive study by contacting several subjects and making observations to obtain data according to the formulation of the problem. The visual form of documentation that is the source of data is the microteaching video of sixth semester students of the English Education Study Program at Mathla'ul Anwar University Banten one video for one academic year, start from the 2019/2020 academic year to the 2022/2023 academic year. The results showed that all data, namely Subject A1 to Subject D1, had both types of pauses based on Fromkin's theory, namely silent pauses and filled pauses. While there are only 3 out of 6 types of tongue slips based on Dardjowidjojo theory, there are anticipation, transposition, and perseveration. While there is no slip of the tongue for the types of blend, malapropism, and substitution. In this research, speech errors such as pauses and slips of the tongue were caused by fatigue, a focus on accents, not mastering the material or vocabulary, nervousness, rushed, and the habit of saying the words “eee” and “aaa”. This finding also expects other researchers to further analyze psycholinguistics so as to minimize other speech errors.

Studying Conversational Adjustments in Interaction: Beyond Acoustic Phonetic Changes.

We examined which measures of complexity are most informative when studying language produced in interaction. Specifically, using these measures, we explored whether native and nonnative speakers modified the higher level properties of their production beyond the acoustic-phonetic level based on the language background of their conversation partner. Using a subset of production data from the Wildcat Corpus that used Diapix, an interactive picture matching task, to elicit production, we compared English language production at the dyad and individual level across three different pair types: eight native pairs (English-English), eight mixed pairs (four English-Chinese and four English-Korean), and eight nonnative pairs (four Chinese-Chinese and four Korean-Korean). At both the dyad and individual levels, native speakers produced longer and more clausally dense speech. They also produced fewer silent pauses and fewer linguistic mazes relative to nonnative speakers. Speakers did not modify their production based on the language background of their interlocutor. The current study examines higher level properties of language production in true interaction. Our results suggest that speakers' productions were determined by their own language background and were independent of that of their interlocutor. Furthermore, these demonstrated promise for capturing syntactic characteristics of language produced in true dialogue. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24712956.

Task-dependent consequences of disfluency in perception of native and non-native speech

AbstractSilent pauses are a natural part of speech production and have consequences for speech perception. However, studies have shown mixed results regarding whether listeners process pauses in native and non-native speech similarly or differently. A possible explanation for these mixed results is that perceptual consequences of pauses differ depending on the type of processing that listeners engage in: a focus on the content/meaning of the speech versus style/form of the speech. Thus, the present study examines the effect of silent pauses of listeners’ perception of native and non-native speech in two different tasks: the perceived credibility and the perceived fluency of the speech. Specifically, we ask whether characteristics of silent pauses influence listeners’ perception differently for native versus non-native speech, and whether this pattern differs when listeners are rating the credibility versus the fluency of the speech. We find that while native speakers are rated as more fluent than non-native speakers, there is no evidence that native speakers are rated as more credible. Our findings suggest that the way a non-native accent and disfluency together impact speech perception differs depending on the type of processing that listeners are engaged in when listening to the speech.

“We Invite You for Lunch”: Post/Colonial Subjectivities and Performances of Tourism in Puducherry, India

Summary Tourism is contested, as Edward Bruner suggests. These contestations may not always take the form of overt conflicts between actors and/or institutions. They may operate in silent pauses and gaps, performances of the actors involved, their identifications and agencies and constructed meanings. In my research, I focus on the town of Puducherry, a French colony merged with India in 1962, to engage with the discourse of authenticity in which the hosts take part. By positioning myself as both tourist and ethnographer, I delve into the complexities of post/colonial subjectivities and performances of identity in Puducherry, with a focus on the Franco-Pondicherrian community who, through their performances reproduce the authentic and reclaim their collective identity. In the process, the members of the community, who are also the hosts in this context, become both the gatekeepers of authenticity and the toured. Using the idea of staged authenticity in a social constructionist frame, I engage with how hosts stage cultural performances in the intimate space of their home which works to make the tourist aware of their cultural heritage and abets their identity practices. Information © The Author 2023

Natural speech as a digital biomarker in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease: Usability of a remote burst speech assessment

AbstractBackgroundSpeech is a complex process, relying on multiple interacting cognitive functions. Fine‐grained speech analysis offers the potential for measuring subtle cognitive deficits in early‐stage Alzheimer’s disease (AD). As such, digital recordings of natural speech are a promising digital biomarker, particularly when measured in bursts (repeated short measurements). This pilot study focused on the usability of remote speech bursts to assess natural speech in cognitively normal (CN) adults with and without AD pathologic change. Additionally, the association between amyloid‐beta (Aβ)‐pathology and speech characteristics was examined.MethodWe included 49 CN older adults from AMYPAD‐PNHS(location VUmc), SCIENCe, and Amsterdam Dementia Cohort (Age mean(M) = 68±standard deviation(SD) = 6, n = 28(57%) female, n = 23(47%) Aβ‐positive, Table 1). Aβ‐status was based on local cut‐offs for Aβ1‐42‐concentrations in cerebrospinal‐fluid or visual inspection of amyloid positron emission tomography (PET)‐imaging. The remote burst assessment comprised seventeen tablet‐based a)picture description, b)journal‐prompt storytelling and c)verbal‐fluency subtasks, administered over five consecutive days in an unsupervised home‐setting. Daily administration time was approximately 10 minutes. To assess usability, participants completed the system usability scale (SUS). Various acoustic features, including silent pauses, pause‐to‐word‐ratio and mean intensity (i.e., perceived loudness), were extracted from the voice recordings, and mean burst scores were calculated over the five‐day period. The association between Aβ‐status and acoustic features was investigated using two‐sample t‐tests stratified by subtask.ResultsThe 49 participants rated usability with a mean SUS‐score of 86(SD = 10). For example, 46(94%) participants thought the assessment‐app was easy to use (Figure 1). Ratings were lower in Aβ‐positive (M = 83±10) than Aβ‐negative individuals (M = 88±9, p = 0.02), reflecting good and excellent usability respectively. Regarding the association between Aβ‐status and acoustic features, more silent pauses were observed for Aβ‐positive (M = 0.30±0.09) compared to Aβ‐negative individuals (M = 0.25±0.06, p = 0.025, Figure 2) in the storytelling subtask. No group differences for pause‐to‐word‐ratio or mean intensity were observed (p>0.05).ConclusionRemote burst assessment of speech is feasible in CN Aβ‐positive and Aβ‐negative adults. Additionally, preliminary results demonstrated that Aβ‐pathology was related to more silent pauses, indicating its potential as a digital AD biomarker. These findings support remote burst speech assessments in monitoring cognitive changes, for example in observational studies and decentralized clinical trials of preclinical AD.

Automated lexical analysis of story recall in healthy controls

AbstractBackgroundImpaired episodic memory is one of the earliest and most prominent symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Examining how patients produce words and phrases in story recall tasks is useful for tracking and understanding progression of their disease. Traditional approaches rely on manual assessments of recalled stories which can be limited, time‐consuming, and not applicable in large‐scale studies. Here, we implement an automated, computational approach to measure verbal episodic memory in a digitally recorded story recall task performed by young healthy speakers using natural language processing models.MethodWe analyzed digitized speech samples of pre‐recorded immediate and delayed Craft Story recall tasks performed by healthy speakers (n = 67, mean age = 20.31 years, SD = 2.17, 45 (67%) females). All transcripts were transcribed by trained annotators and automatically scored for number of verbatim and paraphrase recall, total recall score ( = verbatim+paraphrase), and semantic distance from the original story (degree of semantic similarity between the original craft story and the recalled story based on the Word2vec module in python). We also calculated total word count and number of unique words, and rated all recalled words for word familiarity, concreteness, and semantic ambiguity based on published norms. Number of pauses and total durations of speech and silent pauses were also measured.ResultWe found larger semantic distance between successive words in the delayed recall task compared with immediate recall within speaker (p<.001). Delayed recall also elicited lower total recall scores than immediate recall (p = .03). Comparing the effect sizes of semantic distance vs. total recall scores, our model comparison showed a smaller prediction error for semantic distance (AIC = 95.45) than total recall score (AIC = 736.18). In addition, speakers in the delayed recall task performed more paraphrase recall, had higher total word count, number of unique words, more ambiguous words, and produced more speech (all p‐values<.001).ConclusionOur findings suggest that automated speech analysis can provide informative and cost‐effective measures from a recorded story recall task. The study provides an automated and quantitative way to better measure memory abilities by including semantic distance. Future work will test procedures in patients with AD or other neurodegenerative diseases.

Using Video Activity Reports to Support Remote Project-Based Learning

Distance learning has been expanding. Learner engagement is particularly important in project-based learning (PBL), but the interaction between teacher and learner and the understanding of learner status, including engagement, is not easy. This study aims to support teacher-learner communication based on learner engagement for remote PBL. In this paper, we propose the use of video activity reports by learners to estimate and understand learner engagement and to demonstrate its feasibility on the basis of the relationship between verbal and nonverbal information that can be obtained from video activity reports and learner engagement. Analysis of 232 video activity reports submitted by eight graduate students while working on remote research-based PBLs reveals that learner engagement decreases (1) when the report contained negative words, (2) when filled pauses were frequent or long, and (3) when silent pauses were infrequent or short. Furthermore, the feasibility of an AI-based support system is demonstrated through the design and implementation of a prototype.

Pause toward Nassie Judge’ Speech on Nassie Judge’ Youtube

Pause is one of the speech impediments that anyone can experience. This study aims to determine the forms of pause and the reasons that cause pause in Nessie Judge's speech. The data used is in the form of Nessie Judge's utterances which contain pauses. The approach used in this research is descriptive qualitative. The methods used to collect data are documentation techniques, observation methods, and note-taking techniques. The data obtained were then analyzed using the matching and distribution method. Based on the data analysis carried out, the results are in the form of two forms of pause, namely silent pause and filled pause. The reasons that caused Nessie Judge to experience pause, namely forgetting, attracting attention, looking for the right words, giving time to understand the utterances, taking a breath, already starting the utterances, and being careful when speaking.

The Effects of Task Repetition Schedules on L2 Fluency Enhancement

This article explores the effects of different task repetition schedules on English learners’ oral fluency in terms of speed, breakdown, and repair indices using a PRAAT script to enhance objectivity and consistency in the assessment of learner performances. A total of 90 freshmen participated in the experiment and were divided into three groups: the blocked repetition group, the interleaved repetition group, and a control group. This study adopted a pre- and post-test design. After the learners repetitively practiced the problem-solving tasks for three weeks, their improvement was measured by a new task of the same type. The analyses of speed, breakdown, and repair in learners’ oral performance reported that the experimental groups outperformed the control group in fluency measurement. Specifically, the interleaved repetition group was advantageous compared with the blocked repetition group, except for the silent pause numbers. The findings not only support the interleaving effects and enrich the line of task repetition research but also have pedagogical implications in that introducing interleaved practice in real classrooms is beneficial to L2 speaking enhancement.

Psychological counseling techniques and their use in work with students of vocational education institutions under martial law

Introduction. Mental health crisis counseling is an important students' stress resistance development factor. Aim: to analyze psychological counseling techniques and their effectiveness in training students at vocational education institutions. Methods. Techniques used in psychological counseling of vocational students: interviews, content reflecting (paraphrasing and generalizing), silent pauses, emotions reflecting, interpretation, and confrontation. Results. The concept of counseling is revealed. The psychological counseling techniques used in counseling vocational education students are analyzed. The described psychological counseling techniques are the key tools used by psychologists-counselors. Conclusions. It has been proven that the described psychological counseling techniques are effective means to improve vocational institution students' emotional and psychological conditions, academic performance as well as to cope with students' life crises.

Conversational Analysis: A Holding the Turn on A Trans “Mother” Debates Matt Walsh on Womanhood

The aimed of this research are to examined conversation analysis, specifically turn-taking strategy by type of holding the turn in a channel, YouTube of Matt Walsh, A Trans “Mother” Debates Matt Walsh on Womanhood. This research was used a qualitative technique by Creswell and Sudaryanto and Stenstroom's framework was used to assess the turn-taking strategy used in the conversation, with types of holding the turn being filled pause, repetition, and silent pause. The analysis consists of four steps: watching A Trans “Mother” Debates Matt Walsh on Womanhood, creating the transcription of the dialogue, and the data must be classified and interpreted. According to the findings of this study, a turn-taking strategy appears in the conversation. Filled pauses or verbal fillers, repetition, and silent pauses were all present. Filled pauses of verbal fillers and repetition are the most commonly employed turn-taking strategies on the data source. Therefore, this study suggests that conversation analysis is important for understanding the intent of people's speech. Furthermore, this research can be used to reflect on both theoretical and practical contributions. This study lends credence to the hypothesis of conversation analysis in turn-taking strategy. The researchers found the data of filled pause (5), repetition (4), and silent pause (1).

Automatic Detection of Putative Mild Cognitive Impairment from Speech Acoustic Features in Mandarin-Speaking Elders.

To date, the reliable detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) remains a significant challenge for clinicians. Very few studies investigated the sensitivity of acoustic features in detecting Mandarin-speaking elders at risk for MCI, defined as "putative MCI" (pMCI). This study sought to investigate the possibility of using automatically extracted speech acoustic features to detect elderly people with pMCI and reveal the potential acoustic markers of cognitive decline at an early stage. Forty-one older adults with pMCI and 41 healthy elderly controls completed four reading tasks (syllable utterance, tongue twister, diadochokinesis, and short sentence reading), from which acoustic features were extracted automatically to train machine learning classifiers. Correlation analysis was employed to evaluate the relationship between classifier predictions and participants' cognitive ability measured by Mini-Mental State Examination 2. Classification results revealed that some temporal features (e.g., speech rate, utterance duration, and the number of silent pauses), spectral features (e.g., variability of F1 and F2), and energy features (e.g., SD of peak intensity and SD of intensity range) were effective predictors of pMCI. The best classification result was achieved in the Random Forest classifier (accuracy = 0.81, AUC = 0.81). Correlation analysis uncovered a strong negative correlation between participants' cognitive test scores and the probability estimates of pMCI in the Random Forest classifier, and a modest negative correlation in the Support Vector Machine classifier. The automatic acoustic analysis of speech could provide a promising non-invasive way to assess and monitor the early cognitive decline in Mandarin-speaking elders.

SPEECH DISFLUENCY AS SEEN IN AUTURO GAVINO’S BEFORE ALL OTHERS KETIDAKFASIHAN BERBICARA YANG DITEMUKAN DIDALAM FILM BEFORE ALL OTHERS OLEH AUTURO GAVINO

This study aimed at determining the types of speech disfluency and the most dominant of speech disfluency as seen in Autoro Gavino’s movie Before All Others. The method used in this study was a qualitative method to determine the types of speech disfluency and the quantitative method was used to count the most frequent types found in Before All Others movie. The data in this study was taken from the Before All Others movie and the data form of utterances. The result show that there were 64 utterances showed eight types of speech disfluency in Before All Others. Those types were silent pause (13), filled pause (7), repetition (27), interjection (10), un-retraced false start (1), retraced false start (1), correction (1), and stutter (4). Meanwhile, the most frequent type of speech disfluency that appeared in Before All Others is repetition with a percentage 42.75%.

Pausing and the ‘Othello Error’

The idea of detecting deception from speech is very attractive from a law enforcement perspective, yet research considering the possibility has yielded conflicting results, due to the practical difficulties in investigating the topic. Scientific research is yet to provide forensic linguistics with a reliable means of discerning lies from truths. The present study explores the relationship between truthfulness and pausing behaviour. Various aspects of the acoustics of pausing behaviour were investigated for Standard Southern British English in 30 mock police interviews from the DyViS database (Nolan et al. 2009). A novel distinction was made between prescribed and unprescribed lies, to delineate a potential source of differences in the unscripted content of speakers’ untruthful responses. Among pause duration measures, statistically significant differences were found across all three response types (truth, prescribed lie, unprescribed lie) for response latency, between truths and lies for initial filled pauses, and between unprescribed lies and the other response types for silent pauses. For pause frequency measures, only internal filled pauses showed a statistically significant difference: truths differed from both types of lies, but prescribed lies did not differ from unprescribed lies. Theories of cognitive effort and attempted control are drawn on in accounting for these findings.

An Analysis Of Students Problem In Learning Speaking At MA Arrohman Sumoyono Jombang

Teaching speaking needs high effort since it is difficult subject, the learners have mastery all components of the language such as comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and fluency. This study is aimed to know what the students error in learning speaking and what are the causes. This study is qualitative descriptive, with case study approach. To collect data the researcher used observation, and questionnaire, then the data was analyzed using model of Miles & Huberman. The result of the study was the students error in learning speaking English were (1) speech errors with types of silent pause, filled, repeat, un-retraced, retraced, correction, stutters, and slip tongue (2) grammatical error about omission of bound morpheme, omission of auxiliary, preposition, and wrong in words selection (3) pronunciation error, and code switching. The factor caused the error is knowledge factor, such as having no language aspect, lack of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and never practice; affective factor or students low attitude and motivation, and personal factor was high of shyness, and afraid of being laughed.

Continuous speech with pauses inserted between words increases cortical tracking of speech envelope.

The decoding multivariate Temporal Response Function (decoder) or speech envelope reconstruction approach is a well-known tool for assessing the cortical tracking of speech envelope. It is used to analyse the correlation between the speech stimulus and the neural response. It is known that auditory late responses are enhanced with longer gaps between stimuli, but it is not clear if this applies to the decoder, and whether the addition of gaps/pauses in continuous speech could be used to increase the envelope reconstruction accuracy. We investigated this in normal hearing participants who listened to continuous speech with no added pauses (natural speech), and then with short (250 ms) or long (500 ms) silent pauses inserted between each word. The total duration for continuous speech stimulus with no, short, and long pauses were approximately, 10 minutes, 16 minutes, and 21 minutes, respectively. EEG and speech envelope were simultaneously acquired and then filtered into delta (1-4 Hz) and theta (4-8 Hz) frequency bands. In addition to analysing responses to the whole speech envelope, speech envelope was also segmented to focus response analysis on onset and non-onset regions of speech separately. Our results show that continuous speech with additional pauses inserted between words significantly increases the speech envelope reconstruction correlations compared to using natural speech, in both the delta and theta frequency bands. It also appears that these increase in speech envelope reconstruction are dominated by the onset regions in the speech envelope. Introducing pauses in speech stimuli has potential clinical benefit for increasing auditory evoked response detectability, though with the disadvantage of speech sounding less natural. The strong effect of pauses and onsets on the decoder should be considered when comparing results from different speech corpora. Whether the increased cortical response, when longer pauses are introduced, reflect improved intelligibility requires further investigation.

THE HESITATION OF STUDENTS IN SPEAKING ENGLISH AT THE ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM UNIVERSITAS ISLAM AHMAD DAHLAN SINJAI

Abstract
 Speaking is not only conveying certain meanings but sometimes producing utterances has other meanings, speaking often suddenly changes thoughts, this then results in non-fluency in English. The purpose of this study was to find out the types of hesitation in speaking English in the English language education study program and to find out the factors of students' hesitation in speaking English in the English language education study program Classes of Islamic University of Ahmad Dahlan Sinjai. The type of research used in this research is phenomenological research, qualitative research pays attention to qualitative phenomena related to quality or diversity. Individual beliefs, experiences, and systems of meaning are of particular concern to qualitative researchers. The results of this study found that the most common doubts were fillers that were not lexical such as uhh, err, ee, aah, umm, and ehmm. The slightest hesitation is that a false start must be traced back. And also, there are nine types of doubt that occur viz 1).Silent Pause 2).Filler, 3).Repeat, 4).False Start, (Unrestricted), 5). False Start (Retraced) 6).Corrections, 7). nterjection, 8). Stutters, and 9). Slip of tongue. Based on previous observations, it can be concluded that all students of Islamic University of Ahmad Dahlan Sinjai who are the object of research show hesitation when speaking English.

Exploring the Discourse of Debriefing Interactions: Areas for Improvement

Debriefing has been widely used as part of simulation-based education (SBE) to promote reflective thinking and prepare students for real clinical practice. This study examined a real debriefing transcript to identify its structure and gain insight into communication strategies used by the participants. The sample included an extended debriefing session in which a debriefer and undergraduate students, who participated in a critical care nursing simulation, engaged in a self-reflection phase. Adopting discourse analysis approaches, the analysis revealed how this interaction unfolds. The analysis also unveiled an asymmetric relationship during the debriefing that positioned the debriefer in a position of power and interactional dominance, and placed students in a passive role. Interactional features such as the use of open-ended questions, silent pauses, and informative feedback were identified as effective communication strategies to support the interaction; however, to achieve efficient self-debriefing, debriefers in this setting are encouraged to balance the use of questions to avoid restraining students from engaging and producing extended turns. Moreover, debriefers need to establish a safe environment that optimizes students’ involvement in self-reflection. This study recommends the use of other debriefing techniques to minimize the dominance of the debriefer during the interaction.

The Meaning of Silence and its Functions in Politics

This study deals with one of the essential topics in English linguistics and politics silence, which plays a significant role in politics given the numerous functions it serves. Particularly, it examines and analyses the meaning and function of silence of some well-known current politicians, namely former US presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The rationale behind this choice stems from that these political figures tend to have silent pauses for particular purposes such as disagreement, and insulting. Drawing on Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's "Spiral of Silence" paradigm and van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis, this study also seeks to answer the following main question: what types of silence can be deduced from former US presidents and how can we explain silence from this and other perspectives. It also reviews the interpretation of silence in different contexts and discusses the functions and types of this concept. Results this study has obtained from analysing the data show that silence can showcase a range of categories of communicative functions. This study presents evidence for a number of functions that can be conveyed by the use of silence in speech in political discourse. These include face-saving, affecting, evaluating and linking. Results also suggest that since speakers (politicians) do not identify specific victims by name, they may want to achieve victim equity. This is due to the possibility that bringing up a certain name could bring up issues related to race, religion, politics, etc. Additionally, a speaker could appear depressed while attempting to avoid mentioning the name of a certain family member. As a result, that family’s sorrow can deepen.