Unfilled pauses in Japanese sentences read aloud by non-native learners
Hiroko Hirano, Goh Kawai, Keikichi Hirose, Nobuaki Minematsu · 2006
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-natives' 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 non-native learners. Index Terms: unfilled pauses, second language learning, syntactic structure, perception experiments, multiple regression analyses