Perception of Silent Pauses in Continuous Speech

The perception of silent pauses in continuous speech was investigated experimentally in three genres: political speeches, political interviews and casual interviews. Normal and inverted speech yielded similar perception. The result is interpreted as being an indicator of the salient role of the prosodic structures. The distributional patterning of pauses proves to be responsible for the variability of perception. Pause duration is the essential parameter; pause identification rate is positively correlated with it, and it interacts with the parameter values of the vowel preceding the pause.

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