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ITRW on Non-Linear Speech Processing (NOLISP 05)Barcelona, Spain |
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ITRW on Non-Linear Speech Processing (NOLISP 05)Barcelona, Spain |
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This study reports on the cross-modal analysis (video and audio) of spontaneous narratives produced by children (9 plus-minus 3 months years old) and is aimed to test the role of speech pauses (filled and empty) in children discourse organization. Video analysis was necessary to assess the association between utterance’s meaning and pauses. Empty speech pauses were divided into three categories according to their duration: a) short - from 0.150 up to 0.500 s long; b) medium - from 0.501 up to 0.900 s long; c) long - more than 0.900 s long. Results show that each category plays a different role in the discourse organization, with short pauses and medium pauses preceding utterances containing new added information and long pauses identifying changes in scene, time and event structures, and the functional role of delimitating paragraphs. Moreover, different pause durations also depend on the amount of information contained in the utterances and signal the cognitive effort required to convey new, or given information. The present data may be relevant in assessing the system of rules that underlie pausing means, and identify predictive schemes of the speech temporal structure useful to improve text-to-speech synthesis systems.
Bibliographic reference. Esposito, Anna (2005): "Pausing strategies in children", In NOLISP-2005, 42-48.