A Contribution to a Better Understanding of Silent Pause
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Bárbara Teixeira
Abstract
This paper presents a study about silent pause, which is part of a greater project aimed at building an automatic tool for spontaneous speech prosodic segmentation. The main goal of the paper is to define an ideal minimal duration of silence that can be perceived as pause in Brazilian Portuguese, without capturing the occlusion phase of stop consonants, and could be appropriate as an input for an automatic tool. The study uses data from spontaneous speech corpora, and is based on a perception test with 15 annotators. Besides silence duration, several features that may correlate with pause perception are taken into consideration: (i) the function of the boundary (whether terminal, non-terminal or due to disfluencies); (ii) the articulation rate; (iii) the presence of an f0 reset or shift; (iv) and the phonetic context, in which are analyzed the absolute duration of the vowel before the silence, the absolute duration of rhyme and coda before the silence, the presence of different possible codas before the silence, the absolute duration of consonant after the silence, and the nature of the phone after the silence. The results show that the boundary function clearly affects the cues correlated with pause perception. Our conclusion is that the ideal minimal duration of silence that can be perceived as a pause is 100 ms.
Abstract
This paper presents a study about silent pause, which is part of a greater project aimed at building an automatic tool for spontaneous speech prosodic segmentation. The main goal of the paper is to define an ideal minimal duration of silence that can be perceived as pause in Brazilian Portuguese, without capturing the occlusion phase of stop consonants, and could be appropriate as an input for an automatic tool. The study uses data from spontaneous speech corpora, and is based on a perception test with 15 annotators. Besides silence duration, several features that may correlate with pause perception are taken into consideration: (i) the function of the boundary (whether terminal, non-terminal or due to disfluencies); (ii) the articulation rate; (iii) the presence of an f0 reset or shift; (iv) and the phonetic context, in which are analyzed the absolute duration of the vowel before the silence, the absolute duration of rhyme and coda before the silence, the presence of different possible codas before the silence, the absolute duration of consonant after the silence, and the nature of the phone after the silence. The results show that the boundary function clearly affects the cues correlated with pause perception. Our conclusion is that the ideal minimal duration of silence that can be perceived as a pause is 100 ms.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Preface V
- Contents IX
- Prosody and L2 Learning Interface: The Case of Spanish L2 and Brazilian Portuguese L1 Intonation 1
- The Role of Prosody in the Processing of Ambiguities in Brazilian Portuguese 31
- Defining and Identifying Discourse Markers in Spontaneous Speech 65
- A Contribution to a Better Understanding of Silent Pause 103
- Perceptual and Physiological Correlates of Voice Quality Settings 127
- Multimodal Analysis of Speech Attractiveness Expression 151
- Posture and Gestures Can Affect the Prosodic Speaker Impact in a Remote Presentation 181
- An Acoustic Analysis of Creaky Voice Patterns in Singing 223
- Evaluating OpenAI’s Whisper ASR for Punctuation Prediction and Topic Modeling of life histories of the Museum of the Person 247
- Index
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Preface V
- Contents IX
- Prosody and L2 Learning Interface: The Case of Spanish L2 and Brazilian Portuguese L1 Intonation 1
- The Role of Prosody in the Processing of Ambiguities in Brazilian Portuguese 31
- Defining and Identifying Discourse Markers in Spontaneous Speech 65
- A Contribution to a Better Understanding of Silent Pause 103
- Perceptual and Physiological Correlates of Voice Quality Settings 127
- Multimodal Analysis of Speech Attractiveness Expression 151
- Posture and Gestures Can Affect the Prosodic Speaker Impact in a Remote Presentation 181
- An Acoustic Analysis of Creaky Voice Patterns in Singing 223
- Evaluating OpenAI’s Whisper ASR for Punctuation Prediction and Topic Modeling of life histories of the Museum of the Person 247
- Index
