Occurrence and duration of pauses in relation to speech tempo and structural organization in two speech genres

Abstract

Pauses act as important acoustic cues to prosodic phrase boundaries. However, the distribution and phonetic characteristics of pauses have not yet been fully described either cross-linguistically or in different genres and speech styles within languages. The current study examines the pausal performance of 24 Czech speakers in two genres of read speech: news reading and poetry reciting. The pause rate and pause duration are related to genre differences, overt and covert text organization, and speech tempo. We found a significant effect of several levels of text organization, including a strong effect of punctuation. This was reflected in both measures of pausal performance. A grammatically informed analysis of a subset of pauses within the smallest units revealed a significant contribution for pause rate only. An effect of tempo was found in poetry reciting at a macro level (speaker averages) but not when pauses were observed individually. Genre differences did not manifest consistently and analogically for the two measures. The findings provide evidence that pausing is used systematically by speakers in read speech to convey not only prosodic phrasing but also text structure, among other things.