Occurrence and Duration of Pauses in Relation to Speech Tempo and Structural Organization in Two Speech Genres
Abstract
:1. Introduction
1.1. Background to Pausing
1.2. The Current Study
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Material
Jak lovci rozstřílený dravec | Like an eagle shot by the hunters | |
slét balon v srázy ledných skal. | A balloon crashed into icy rocks. | [end of D1] |
Zřítil se z člunu vzduchoplavec | Fell down with his vessel an aeronaut | |
a údy své si roztřískal. | And horribly smashed his limbs. | [end of D2] |
2.2. Phonetic Segmentation and Pause Measurement
- Start of the pause aligned with the end of vocal activity; namely, the end of friction noise after fricatives, affricates, and plosive bursts; the end of formant structure after sonorants when the transition was abrupt and unambiguous; and the end of the devoiced portion of sonorants when their articulation was weakened, leading to voiceless formants (but excluding potential breath noises).
- End of the pause aligned with the start of vocal activity; namely, the start of a visible acoustic reflection of articulatory activity (friction, formant structure); however, initial voiceless plosives with silent closures, lacking visible information in the spectrograms, were segmented in such a way that their total duration ranged between 50–100 ms (typically) or between 50–120 ms when a strong emphasis was produced and perceived on the word (mostly in poetry reciting). The remaining portion of the silence was annotated as a pause (see Figure 1).
2.3. Coding of Pause Contexts (Text Structure)
- Within-unit—no punctuation (within a sentence or a verse line);
- Within-unit—with punctuation (within a sentence or a verse line);
- End-of-smaller-unit (end of a verse line);
- End-of-unit (end of a sentence or a distich);
- End-of-larger-unit (end of a stanza).
- -II: Pausing blocked
- –
- within multi-word personal names, e.g., Bohuslav Sobotka (first and family name)
- –
- after proclitics, e.g., pod kontrolou (under control)
- –
- before enclitics, e.g., potvrzuje to (confirms it)
- -I: Pausing not recommended
- –
- within genitive constructions (without modifiers), e.g., rozvoje města (expansion of the city)
- –
- between an adjective + noun, e.g., plavovlasou lásku (fair-haired sweetheart)
- –
- between a numeral + noun, e.g., dva stupně (two degrees)
- I: Weaker break
- –
- at the subject–verb division when the subject consists of one noun and at most one modifier, e.g., muži nad sklenkou # půl ironicky sní (men over glasses # dream half ironically)
- –
- before a conjunction + one-word constituent, e.g., lože smrtelné # a hrob (deathbed # and grave)
- II: Break
- –
- before longer complements of at least two autosemantic words, e.g., # kvůli údajným neregulérnostem (# because of alleged irregularities)
- –
- before the final adverbial of at least two stress groups, e.g., matku Bůh povolal # ve svoji slávu (mother was taken by God # into his glory)
- –
- rhythmical analogy between the verse lines, e.g., trochu se vraždilo # trochu se kradlo//pereme pereme # špinavé prádlo (there were some murders # there were some thefts//we wash we wash # dirty laundry); [the object in the second line would not be separated from the verb were it not for the analogy with the first line]
- III: Stronger break
- –
- after the initial adverbial, e.g., po dnešním jednání představitelů vlády # (after today’s meeting of government members #); [there is no comma in Czech orthography]
- –
- before an apposition, e.g., členka komise # Nikola Nováková (member of the board # Nicola Newman)
- –
- before a conjunction + multi-word constituent, e.g., # a dlouhodobým zatížením rozpočtu (# and long-term burdening of the budget)
2.4. Data Processing and Statistical Analysis
3. Results
3.1. Data Presentation
3.1.1. General Overview
3.1.2. Effect of Overt Text Structure
3.1.3. Effect of Covert Text Structure
3.1.4. Effect of Articulation Rate
3.2. Statistical Evaluation
3.2.1. Overt Text Structure and Other Predictors
3.2.2. Covert Text Structure
4. Discussion
4.1. Factors Affecting Pausing
4.2. Genre Differences
4.3. Limitations and Directions for Future Research
5. Conclusions
Supplementary Materials
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Genre | Level | Pause Context | Absolute Count | Relative Count | Median dur. (ms) | Mean dur. (ms) | SD (ms) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
News reading | 1 | within-unit (no punct.) | 240 | 4% | 218 | 235 | 187 |
2 | within-unit (punct.) | 275 | 76% | 296 | 306 | 159 | |
3 | end-of-unit | 336 | 100% | 779 | 815 | 293 | |
Poetry reciting | 1 | within-unit (no punct.) | 217 | 3% | 136 | 185 | 143 |
2 | within-unit (punct.) | 628 | 79% | 265 | 321 | 242 | |
3 | end-of-smaller-unit | 757 | 44% | 450 | 471 | 243 | |
4 | end-of-unit | 532 | 65% | 727 | 800 | 388 | |
5 | end-of-larger-unit | 264 | 100% | 1082 | 1144 | 397 |
Genre | Level | Pausing | Absolute Count | Relative Count | Median dur. (ms) | Mean dur. (ms) | SD (ms) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
News reading | -II | Blocked | 10 | 5% | 118 | 132 | 51 |
-I | Not recommended | 15 | 5% | 185 | 190 | 128 | |
I | Weaker break | 30 | 16% | 272 | 256 | 155 | |
II | Break | 66 | 13% | 202 | 245 | 274 | |
III | Stronger break | 119 | 33% | 231 | 238 | 141 | |
Poetry reciting | -II | Blocked | 5 | 4% | 211 | 177 | 64 |
-I | Not recommended | 30 | 6% | 194 | 238 | 236 | |
I | Weaker break | 33 | 11% | 126 | 193 | 177 | |
II | Break | 91 | 19% | 125 | 173 | 154 | |
III | Stronger break | 59 | 41% | 147 | 193 | 130 |
Genre | Correlation | r | p |
---|---|---|---|
News reading | AR slb/s ~ N of pauses | −0.31 [−0.63; 0.11] | 0.142 |
AR seg/s ~ N of pauses | −0.23 [−0.58; 0.19] | 0.284 | |
Poetry reciting | AR slb/s ~ N of pauses | −0.08 [−0.47; 0.33] | 0.701 |
AR seg/s ~ N of pauses | −0.07 [−0.46; 0.34] | 0.743 | |
News reading | AR slb/s ~ median of pause duration | 0.29 [−0.13; 0.62] | 0.169 |
AR seg/s ~ median of pause duration | 0.29 [−0.12; 0.62] | 0.164 | |
Poetry reciting | AR slb/s ~ median of pause duration | −0.47 [−0.73; −0.08] | 0.020 * |
AR seg/s ~ median of pause duration | −0.45 [−0.72; −0.05] | 0.028 * |
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Šturm, P.; Volín, J. Occurrence and Duration of Pauses in Relation to Speech Tempo and Structural Organization in Two Speech Genres. Languages 2023, 8, 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010023
Šturm P, Volín J. Occurrence and Duration of Pauses in Relation to Speech Tempo and Structural Organization in Two Speech Genres. Languages. 2023; 8(1):23. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010023
Chicago/Turabian StyleŠturm, Pavel, and Jan Volín. 2023. "Occurrence and Duration of Pauses in Relation to Speech Tempo and Structural Organization in Two Speech Genres" Languages 8, no. 1: 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010023
APA StyleŠturm, P., & Volín, J. (2023). Occurrence and Duration of Pauses in Relation to Speech Tempo and Structural Organization in Two Speech Genres. Languages, 8(1), 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010023