Silent Pauses Research Articles

Filled Pauses as a Special Case of Automatic Speech Behaviors and the Effect of Parkinson's Disease

Purpose In Parkinson's disease (PD), there are significant changes in the basal ganglia, a structure known to be important for controlling automatic responses to cues. Changes to the basal ganglia in PD impair an individual's ability to trigger a behavior in response to cues, but more so in response to internal cues more than external ones. Filled pauses are considered a subconscious or automatic speech response to an internal cue that there are difficulties with ongoing communication. Typical speakers use filled pauses (such as uh or um) to mark silent pauses. The purpose of this study was to examine how automatic speech responses are impacted in PD by looking at filled and silent pausing behaviors, extending our understanding of the role of the basal ganglia in automatic behaviors. We hypothesized that individuals with PD would use fewer filled pauses and longer silent pauses. We also hypothesized that longer pauses would be more likely to be marked with filled pauses and that this relationship would be weaker in speakers with PD. Method Speech samples were collected via a story-retelling task from 15 individuals with PD and 18 age-matched controls. Duration and frequency of filled and silent pauses were measured using spectrographic analysis. Number and duration of marked silent pauses (those consecutive with 1 or more filled pauses) were measured. The t tests and analyses of variance were used to test our hypotheses. Results There was no significant difference in the number of silent pauses between groups, but the duration of silent pauses was significantly greater for individuals with PD. Despite this, individuals with PD produced significantly fewer filled pauses and fewer marked silent pauses. For both groups, longer silent pauses were more likely to be marked by filled pauses, but individuals with PD marked a smaller percentage of silent pauses at longer durations than controls. Conclusions Producing fewer marked silent pauses, coupled with longer silent pauses, reduces natural cues to discourse and puts people with PD at greater risk of sounding unnatural and losing their communicative turn. These results suggest that automatic responses regarding speech production difficulties are impaired by PD. This interpretation fits with nonspeech literature where automatic responses have been demonstrated to be impaired in PD.

Daily 6: An Approach to Foster Oral Fluency of English as a Foreign Language in Adolescents

This action research study aimed to examine the possible impact of the Daily 6 approach on the oral fluency in English of 13 adolescents. This approach (extension of the existing Daily 5™ framework) introduced a sixth step, “speak to someone”, to respond to the lack of oral fluency limiting participants’ overall speaking performance in English as a foreign language. Data were gathered through surveys, diagnostic and achievement tests, and recordings using VoiceThread™. The coding and a small sample hypothesis test for means analysis unveiled the significance of the Daily 6 approach to enhance oral fluency through technology. Results displayed gains in oral fluency (length of runs, silent pauses, length of pauses, filled pauses, and pace) and positive changes in attitudinal responses within a low-anxiety environment.

Using strategic pauses during shared reading with preschoolers: Time for prediction is better than time for reflection when learning new words

Preschoolers can learn vocabulary through shared book reading, especially when given the opportunity to predict and/or reflect on the novel words encountered in the story. Readers often pause and encourage children to guess or repeat novel words during shared reading, and prior research has suggested a positive correlation between how much readers dramatically pause and how well words are later retained. This experimental study of 60 3- to 5-year-olds compared the effects of placing pauses before target words to encourage predictions, placing pauses after target words to encourage reflection, or not pausing at all on children’s retention of novel monster names in a rhymed storybook. Children who heard dramatic pauses that invited prediction before the monsters were named identified more at test than children who heard either post-target pauses or the story read verbatim. In addition, there was an interaction between pre- vs. post-target pausing and whether the pauses were silent or replaced with an eliciting question, such that silent pauses were more effective before the target words, while eliciting questions were more effective after. Overall, dramatic silent pauses before new words in a story were found to best help children attend to and remember those new words.

Pause behavior within reformulations and the proficiency level of second language learners of English

AbstractThis research reports on a quantitative analysis of the combination of two types of disfluency, reformulations and pauses, in the speech of lower intermediate and advanced speakers of English as a second language (L2). The present study distinguishes between corrections and false starts within the category of reformulations as well as between silent and filled pauses. It focuses on the extent to which pause behavior within reformulations varies according to the stage of L2 development and the type of reformulation used. An analysis was made of 56 L2 speakers’ 2-min monologues. The results showed that lower intermediate and advanced speakers differed on the frequency of silent pauses inserted in corrections but not on their frequency in false starts. This suggests that false starts depend less on proficiency level, and may reflect temporary problems with conceptual encoding or extralinguistic factors that contribute to the efficacy of L2 production rather than difficulties with linguistic processing per se. The frequency of silent pauses rather than silent pause duration or the frequency and duration of filled pauses appeared to be the only marker to differentiate between false starts and corrections across the two proficiency groups.

Silent Pauses in the Speech of Yemeni EFL Learners

Speaking fluently is characterized not only by the speed of oral delivery but also by the absence of non-fluent pauses. This paper aims at investigating the pausing phenomena in the speech of the Yemeni learners of English. It investigated three aspects of silent pauses, the frequency, the placement and the length. The data were collected from 20 level four students enrolled in the Department English Language, Faculty of Education, Taiz University. The participants were recorded narrating the events of a short silent video immediately after watching it. Data were analyzed quantitatively utilizing the waveform spectrogram software called PRAAT. The findings showed that the Yemeni EFL learners overused non-fluent silent pauses. Additionally, they paused in the middle of the clauses rather than at the clause boundaries. With respect to the mean length of silent pauses, the speech of the EFL learners at Taiz University was full of long silent pauses which took one-third of the total speaking time. Therefore, it is highly suggested that the teachers of English should draw the learners’ attention to the notion of pausing and its effect on speaking fluency in order to lessen or avoid it. Teachers should also vary their activities to help the learners speak fluently without much pausing.

Fraseamento prosódico de estruturas parentéticas em dados de leitura no português do Rio de Janeiro

O presente artigo focaliza a realização de estruturas parentéticas no português do Brasil (PB), a partir de um ponto de vista fonológico. Partindo da literatura sobre o tema – não só no escopo da fonologia, mas também abarcando a interface com a sintaxe e os estudos do texto –, realizou-se a análise acústica e entoacional de 568 sentenças lidas por informantes cariocas do sexo feminino (42 sentenças x 15 falantes, excluídos 62 dados), a partir do aparato teórico-metodológico da Teoria Autossegmental e Métrica da Entoação e da Fonologia Prosódica, a fim de contribuir para a descrição da gramática entoacional do PB, no que se refere ao fraseamento prosódico. A análise considerou a ocorrência e duração de pausas silenciosas antes e depois da parentética, além dos movimentos tonais no interior dos três sintagmas entoacionais (IPs) ideais que constituem cada enunciado. Confirmaram-se duas das hipóteses iniciais: (i) a de que a estrutura parentética é realizada, no PB, como um IP independente e (ii) a de que o fraseamento prosódico da parentética é sensível ao tamanho do primeiro IP do enunciado. Os resultados revelaram diferenças interessantes em relação àqueles obtidos por outros pesquisadores para o português europeu (PE): no PB, os dados indicam serem mais frequentes as pausas no final da parentética e os contornos descendentes no primeiro e no segundo IPs, enquanto no PE predominam as pausas no início da parentética e os contornos ascendentes.

Variables affecting the maintenance of L2 proficiency and fluency four years post-study abroad

AbstractThis study explored the attrition / maintenance of second language (L2) proficiency by examining longitudinally the oral skills of a group of L2 French and L2 Spanish participants (n = 33) four years after study abroad, and three years after completing an undergraduate degree in languages. Multiple regressions were conducted to determine the extent to which language contact / use and attained proficiency at the end of study abroad could predict changes in fluency and oral proficiency. Results demonstrated that those variables that improved significantly during study abroad (e.g., speech rate) were maintained four years later. The amount of target language contact / use played a role in maintenance of aspects of fluency such as speech rate and frequency of silent pauses, whereas proficiency attained at the end of study abroad played a role in the use of corrections. Both language contact / use and proficiency attained are important variables in the long-term maintenance of overall proficiency.

Language planning and pauses in story retell: Evidence from aging and Parkinson’s disease

We examined if and how pauses during connected speech reflect cognitive processes underlying language formulation in typical aging and Parkinson’s disease (PD), beyond respiratory and motor-speech mechanisms. The frequency of silent pauses was measured (a) in relation to different linguistic (independent clausal, subordinate clausal, phrasal, and atypical) boundaries and (b) proficiency measures of language production in young adults, older adults, and individuals with PD. At the group level, aging, but not PD, resulted in increased pausing at atypical linguistic locations. However, in both aging and PD, individuals’ reduced production of syntactically complex sentences was associated with more frequent pausing at various typical prosodic (clausal or phrasal) boundaries. Frequency of pauses was not associated with individual performance in grammaticality of sentences and lexical-semantic production. Overall, the present study demonstrated that production of pauses during connected speech reflects cognitive processes underlying language production beyond respiratory-physiological processes of communication. Assessing production of pauses in connected speech may augment, but does not replace, assessment of language production in clinical practice.

Silent Pauses in the Speech of Yemeni EFL Learners

Speaking fluently is characterized not only by the speed of oral delivery but also by the absence of non-fluent pauses. This paper aims at investigating the pausing phenomena in the speech of the Yemeni learners of English. It investigated three aspects of silent pauses, the frequency, the placement and the length. The data were collected from 20 level four students enrolled in the Department English Language, Faculty of Education, Taiz University. The participants were recorded narrating the events of a short silent video immediately after watching it. Data were analyzed quantitatively utilizing the waveform spectrogram software called PRAAT. The findings showed that the Yemeni EFL learners overused non-fluent silent pauses. Additionally, they paused in the middle of the clauses rather than at the clause boundaries. With respect to the mean length of silent pauses, the speech of the EFL learners at Taiz University was full of long silent pauses which took one-third of the total speaking time. Therefore, it is highly suggested that the teachers of English should draw the learners’ attention to the notion of pausing and its effect on speaking fluency in order to lessen or avoid it. Teachers should also vary their activities to help the learners speak fluently without much pausing.

Individual patterns of disfluency across speaking styles

Features of speech related to fluency such as filled and silent pauses, sound prolongations, repetitions and self-interruptions exhibit considerable variation among speakers, yet the speaker-specificity of such features has received little attention inforensic phonetic research. The present study investigates the extent to which individual differences in disfluency behaviour are preserved across different speaking styles, a key concern for forensic speaker comparison cases. Disfluency phenomena in the speech of 20 male speakers of Standard Southern British English undertaking a simulated police interview task are compared with the occurrence of the same set of phenomena in the speech of the same speakers participating in a telephone conversation with an 'accomplice'. The speakers' disfluency features are analysed using TOFFA 'Taxonomy of Fluency Features for Forensic Analysis' (McDougall and Duckworth 2017). Individuals exhibit a wide range of variation in their overall rate of production of disfluency features, and these rates are relatively consistent within-speaker across interview and telephone styles. The results for each specific disfluency feature type also show patterns of relatively consistent behaviour within-speaker across-style for most features. For both interview and telephone styles, discriminant analyses based on speaker profiles of disfluency features demonstrate that disfluency features carry speaker-specific information which could be considered alongside other analyses in forensic speaker comparison cases.

Speech Errors Produced by EFL Learners of Islamic Boarding School in Telling English Story

The students of Islamic Boarding School Nurul Islam are used to learn spoken English, but they still make some errors when they are speaking. They often produce some speech errors when they are making an English conversation or when they are getting turn to speak in front of the class. This study aims to investigate the existence and the frequency of speech errors especially Silent Pause and Filled Pause produced by the students of Islamic Boarding School Nurul Islam in telling English Story. This research is a descriptive-qualitative with data presented in statistical forms. The object of this research is Speech Errors produced by students in telling English Story. And the respondents are 30 students from the 8th grade of English Tutorial Program in Islamic Boarding School Nurul Islam in the academic year of 2016/2017. This research was conducted by observation. It was to investigate the existence of Silent Pause and Filled Pause produced by the students in telling English story and to investigate the percentages of each speech errors. The findings of the observation in this research show 603 (100%) speech errors produced by students. Silent pause is 524 (87%) and Filled Pause is 79 (13%).

Validated automatic speech biomarkers in primary progressive aphasia.

ObjectiveTo automatically extract and quantify specific disease biomarkers of prosody from the acoustic properties of speech in patients with primary progressive aphasia.MethodsWe analyzed speech samples from 59 progressive aphasic patients (non‐fluent/agrammatic = 15, semantic = 21, logopenic = 23; ages 50–85 years) and 31 matched healthy controls (ages 54–89 years). Using a novel, automated speech analysis protocol, we extracted acoustic measurements of prosody, including fundamental frequency and speech and silent pause durations, and compared these between groups. We then examined their relationships with clinical tests, gray matter atrophy, and cerebrospinal fluid analytes.ResultsWe found a narrowed range of fundamental frequency in patients with non‐fluent/agrammatic variant aphasia (mean 3.86 ± 1.15 semitones) compared with healthy controls (6.06 ± 1.95 semitones; P < 0.001) and patients with semantic variant aphasia (6.12 ± 1.77 semitones; P = 0.001). Mean pause rate was significantly increased in the non‐fluent/agrammatic group (mean 61.4 ± 20.8 pauses per minute) and the logopenic group (58.7 ± 16.4 pauses per minute) compared to controls. In an exploratory analysis, narrowed fundamental frequency range was associated with atrophy in the left inferior frontal cortex. Cerebrospinal level of phosphorylated tau was associated with an acoustic classifier combining fundamental frequency range and pause rate (r = 0.58, P = 0.007). Receiver operating characteristic analysis with this combined classifier distinguished non‐fluent/agrammatic speakers from healthy controls (AUC = 0.94) and from semantic variant patients (AUC = 0.86).InterpretationRestricted fundamental frequency range and increased pause rate are characteristic markers of speech in non‐fluent/agrammatic primary progressive aphasia. These can be extracted with automated speech analysis and are associated with left inferior frontal atrophy and cerebrospinal phosphorylated tau level.

Backward-looking sentence processing in typically disfluent versus stuttered speech: ERP evidence

ABSTRACTThe aim was to determine how backward-looking sentence processing is affected by typically disfluent versus stuttered speech. Two listener groups heard Garden Path (GP) and control sentences. GP sentences contained no disfluency, a silent pause, or a filled pause before the disambiguating verb. For one group, the sentence preambles additionally contained stuttering-like disfluencies. Comprehension accuracy, event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to disambiguating verbs, and perceptual speaker ratings, were compared between groups. The With Stuttering group perceived the speaker as less competent but had better comprehension accuracy for GP sentences. ERPs to disambiguating verbs in GP sentences included a P600 component, indexing backward-looking sentence processing, but only for the No Stuttering group. Other ERP components, elicited to GP sentences with silent/filled pauses, did not differ between groups. Results suggest that listeners abandon prior expectations when processing sentences containing stuttering-like disfluencies, possibly because they lack a speaker model defined by the presence of stuttering.

Changes in Speech Chunking in Reading Aloud is a Marker of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild-to-Moderate Alzheimer's Disease.

Speech and Language Impairments, generally attributed to lexico-semantic deficits, have been documented in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study investigates the temporal organisation of speech (reflective of speech production planning) in reading aloud in relation to cognitive impairment, particularly working memory and attention deficits in MCI and AD. The discriminative ability of temporal features extracted from a newly designed read speech task is also evaluated for the detection of MCI and AD. Sixteen patients with MCI, eighteen patients with mild-to-moderate AD and thirty-six healthy controls (HC) underwent a battery of neuropsychological tests and read a set of sentences varying in cognitive load, probed by manipulating sentence length and syntactic complexity. Our results show that Mild-to-Moderate AD is associated with a general slowness of speech, attributed to a higher number of speech chunks, silent pauses and dysfluences, and slower speech and articulation rates. Speech chunking in the context of high cognitive-linguistic demand appears to be an informative marker of MCI, specifically related to early deficits in working memory and attention. In addition, Linear Discriminant Analysis shows the ROC AUCs (Areas Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves) of identifying MCI vs. HC, MCI vs. AD and AD vs. HC using these speech characteristics are 0.75, 0.90 and 0.94 respectively. The implementation of connected speech-based technologies in clinical and community settings may provide additional information for the early detection of MCI and AD.

Linguistic Feature Analyses of Chinese Learners of English and Contributions of Discrete Features to Perceptual Judgment

This study (a) conducted a feature analysis of the spoken data of Chinese university students in pronunciation, grammar, and discourse, (b) investigated the contributions of the discrete linguistic features to the perceptual ratings on foreign accent, comprehensibility, delivery, and general language use. Ten university learners were selected from the Spoken Corpus of the English of Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese learners (http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/phonetics/), in which two speakers were paired up to conduct a five minutes interview. Three-level analyses were done to investigate Chinese learners’ linguistic features. Forty listeners from four L1 language backgrounds were recruited to rate the speech samples. The results show that strongly negative correlations were found between the production and perceptual rating scores for “omission of consonant(s) in final position” “redundant article ‘the’”, “silent pauses” and “discourse markers,” suggesting that the four features can be perceived and exert strong negative influences on perceptual judgments. Pronunciation rating had the strongest positive correlations with “foreign accentedness”; grammar rating had the strongest positive correlations with “general language use”; discourse rating had the strongest positive correlations with “general delivery”, and “general language use.” Regarding the rating of comprehensibility, “misuse of conjunctions” “redundant article ‘the’”, “silent pauses”, “lengthening”, and “stressing” showed strong negative correlations whereas “filled pauses” had strong positive correlations with it. Regarding the rating of foreign accentedness, strong negative correlations were found between “omission of consonant(s) in final position”, “lengthening”, “discourse markers”, and “stressing” and the rating of “foreign accentedness”.

Walking while talking: Young adults flexibly allocate resources between speech and gait

BackgroundWalking while talking is an ideal multitask behavior to assess how young healthy adults manage concurrent tasks as it is well-practiced, cognitively demanding, and has real consequences for impaired performance in either task. Since the association between cognitive tasks and gait appears stronger when the gait task is more challenging, gait challenge was systematically manipulated in this study. ObjectiveTo understand how young adults accomplish the multitask behavior of walking while talking as the gait challenge was systematically manipulated. MethodsSixteen young adults (21 ± 1.6 years, 9 males) performed three gait tasks with and without speech: unobstructed gait (easy), obstacle crossing (moderate), obstacle crossing and tray carrying (difficult). Participants also provided a speech sample while seated for a baseline indicator of speech. The speech task was to speak extemporaneously about a topic (e.g. first car). Gait speed and the duration of silent pauses during speaking were determined. Silent pauses reflect cognitive processes involved in speech production and language planning. ResultsWhen speaking and walking without obstacles, gait speed decreased (relative to walking without speaking) but silent pause duration did not change (relative to seated speech). These changes are consistent with the idea that, in the easy gait task, participants placed greater value on speech pauses than on gait speed, likely due to the negative social consequences of impaired speech. In the moderate and difficult gait tasks both parameters changed: gait speed decreased and silent pauses increased. ConclusionWalking while talking is a cognitively demanding task for healthy young adults, despite being a well-practiced habitual activity. These findings are consistent with the integrated model of task prioritization from Yogev-Seligmann et al., [1].

Silent pauses in aphasia

Pauses may be studied as an aspect of the temporal organization of speech, as well as an index of internal cognitive processes, such as word access, selection and retrieval, monitoring, articulatory planning, and memory. Several studies have demonstrated specific distributional patterns of pauses in typical speech. However, evidence from patients with language impairment is sparse and restricted to small-scale studies. The aim of the present study is to investigate empty pause distribution and associations between pause variables and linguistic elements in aphasia. Eighteen patients with chronic aphasia following a left hemisphere stroke were recruited. The control group consisted of 19 healthy adults matched for age, gender, and years of formal schooling. Speech samples from both groups were transcribed, and silent pauses were annotated using ELAN. Our results indicate that in both groups, pause duration distribution follows a log-normal bimodal model with significantly different thresholds between the two populations, yet specific enough for each distribution to justify classification into two distinct groups of pauses for each population: short and long. Moreover, we found differences between the patient and control group, prominently with regard to long pause duration and rate. Long pause indices were also associated with fundamental linguistics elements, such as mean length of utterance. Overall, we argue that post-stroke aphasia may induce quantitative but not qualitative alterations of pause patterns during speech, and further suggest that long pauses may serve as an index of internal cognitive processes supporting sentence planning. Our findings are discussed within the context of pause pattern quantification strategies as potential markers of cognitive changes in aphasia, further stressing the importance of such measures as an integral part of language assessment in clinical populations.

Turn Holding Cues in Multi-participant Conversations in Downton Abbey Te

This study aimed to identify the turn-holding cues in Downton Abbey television series and describe the factors contributing to the effective use of them. This study used a descriptive qualitative method. The data were multi-participant conversations in the television series, specifically the first three episodes of the first season. The procedures for conducting the study were collecting the data, completing them with their context, setting, and then analyzing them. The result shows that to hold a turn, speakers use cues such as filled pause, verbal filler, tactically placed silent pause, new start, grammatical incompleteness, and rush-through. The speakers’ attempt to hold the turn are successfully accomplished as they can continue finishing their utterances without any interruption from other participants. The factors contributing to the effective use of turn-holding cues are putting the cues at strategic places, and most importantly, cooperation among participants.

A Speech Recognition-based Solution for the Automatic Detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment from Spontaneous Speech.

Background: Even today the reliable diagnosis of the prodromal stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains a great challenge. Our research focuses on the earliest detectable indicators of cognitive de-cline in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Since the presence of language impairment has been reported even in the mild stage of AD, the aim of this study is to develop a sensitive neuropsychological screening method which is based on the analysis of spontaneous speech production during performing a memory task. In the future, this can form the basis of an Internet-based interactive screening software for the recognition of MCI.Methods: Participants were 38 healthy controls and 48 clinically diagnosed MCI patients. The provoked spontaneous speech by asking the patients to recall the content of 2 short black and white films (one direct, one delayed), and by answering one question. Acoustic parameters (hesitation ratio, speech tempo, length and number of silent and filled pauses, length of utterance) were extracted from the recorded speech sig-nals, first manually (using the Praat software), and then automatically, with an automatic speech recogni-tion (ASR) based tool. First, the extracted parameters were statistically analyzed. Then we applied machine learning algorithms to see whether the MCI and the control group can be discriminated automatically based on the acoustic features.Results: The statistical analysis showed significant differences for most of the acoustic parameters (speech tempo, articulation rate, silent pause, hesitation ratio, length of utterance, pause-per-utterance ratio). The most significant differences between the two groups were found in the speech tempo in the delayed recall task, and in the number of pauses for the question-answering task. The fully automated version of the analysis process – that is, using the ASR-based features in combination with machine learning - was able to separate the two classes with an F1-score of 78.8%.Conclusion: The temporal analysis of spontaneous speech can be exploited in implementing a new, auto-matic detection-based tool for screening MCI for the community.

Prosody in tourist oral communication. Pausing in city audio guides

Abstract – Over the last decades, tourist communication has been widely investigated in various languages, involving a variety of printed and Web-based genres and a variety of perspectives. However, as far as oral tourist genres are concerned, there seems to be a gap in academic research, with the published literature including a study by Gavioli (2015) on dialogue interpreting in guided tours in English, a study by Francesconi (2014) on prosody in a BBC travel radio programme, a study by Ravazzolo (2014) on guided tours of botanic parks in French, and a study by Nardi (2012) on museum audio guides in German. Even lesser attention has been paid to the prosodic features of speech in oral tourist genres, and how these are employed to effectively deliver the contents of the tour. This study attempts to contribute to developing this specific area of tourist studies by investigating prosody in city audio guides. More specifically, the study focuses on the use of pauses in city audio guides in Italian and in English. At a theoretical level, the city audio guide is intended here as a form of informative script-based public speaking, whose main function is to provide historical and artistic information on the sites visited by users. On the basis of such theoretical premises, the study unfolds around the assumption that prosody – and pausing in this specific case – plays a key role in effective content delivery and uptake. The study was carried out on 42 audio fragments selected from the scripts of 21 audio guides produced in Italy, the UK and the USA. In each audio fragment, silent pauses were annotated by means of PRAAT , a software for acoustic analysis of speech. The use of pauses between utterances was then investigated in each group of fragments, quantitatively in terms of pause duration variation, and qualitatively in relation to the textual features of the selected portions of scripts. The results show a more frequent use of long pauses and patterned pausing in the British audio fragments with respect to their Italian and American counterparts. Finally, the results are framed within a discussion on best practices in public speaking.