EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

The Effect of Surrounding Phrase Lengths on Pause Duration

Elena Zvonik, Fred Cummins

University College Dublin, Ireland

Little is known about the determining influences on the length of silent intervals at IP boundaries and no current models accurately predict their duration. The contribution of independent factors with different characteristic properties to pause duration needs to be explored. The present study seeks to investigate if pause duration is correlated with the length of sentences or phrases preceding and following a pause. We find that two independent factors - the length of an IP (intonational phrase) preceding a pause and the length of an IP following a pause combine superadditively. The probability of a pause being short (<300 ms) rises greatly if both the preceding and the following phrases are short(<=10 syllables).

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Zvonik, Elena / Cummins, Fred (2003): "The effect of surrounding phrase lengths on pause duration", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 777-780.