Perception experiments suggest that natives judge non-native unfilled pauses as indiscriminate and indecisive. Multiple regression analyses of unfilled pauses indicate a connection between syntactic structure and pause location and duration. Native speakers uniformly pause at large syntactic breaks with marked duration, whereas non-nativesÂ’ unfilled pauses are spread over various locations, possibly reflecting limited syntactic planning. Our method might be used to synthesize appropriate unfilled pauses in text-to-speech systems, and to train pausing behavior in automated pronunciation learning systems for nonnative learners.
Cite as: Hirano, H., Kawai, G., Hirose, K., Minematsu, N. (2006) Unfilled pauses in Japanese sentences read aloud by non-native learners. Proc. Interspeech 2006, paper 1871-Mon3FoP.9, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2006-250
@inproceedings{hirano06_interspeech,
author={Hiroko Hirano and Goh Kawai and Keikichi Hirose and Nobuaki Minematsu},
title={{Unfilled pauses in Japanese sentences read aloud by non-native learners}},
year=2006,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2006},
pages={paper 1871-Mon3FoP.9},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2006-250}
}