A Study of Speech Pauses for Multilingual Time-Scaling Applications

In this paper we present a study of silent speech pauses at three different speaking rates, based on the analysis of four hours of read speech in six European languages. Our results confirm ear-lier observations by Campione et al. [1] that the logarithmic du-ration of the pauses can be well approximated by a bi-Gaussian distribution and we found this also to be true at slow and fast speaking rates. Our analysis further shows that, as far as the long speech pauses are concerned, similar strategies for speak-ing slowly or rapidly are used in all languages considered. For speaking slowly, speakers increase the total amount of pauses and they effectively use a wider range of pause durations. Over-all, however, besides using more pauses, there appeared to be no striking change in the average pause duration, nor in the vari-ance of the distribution of the pause durations. For speaking rapidly, speakers decrease the amount of pauses used and they refrain from using the longest pauses that occur in their normal speech. Overall, this results in a lower average duration of the pauses and a smaller variance of the pause durations