Pause is an act of stopping in the

Pause is an act of stopping in the flow of speech

From a descriptive point of view, two classifications of pauses are in general use. The first one is a physical and linguistic classification second one is a psychological and psycholinguistic classification.

• — Intra-segmental pauses are those which are related to the occlusions of the vocal tract in normal speech production.

— Inter-lexical pauses are those which may appear between two words. They constitute the first segmentation of speech, or the phrasing that is likely to facilitate the perceptual interpretation of the speech utterance. An example is the differentiation between “a Turkish (carpet salesman)” and “(a Turkish carpet) salesman” (Figure 2).

A Psycholinguistic Classification • Silent pauses correspond to the perception of a silent portion in the speech signal. Such pauses may be produced in conjunction with an inspiration, swallowing, any laryngo-phonatory reflex, or a silent expiration. • — Filled pauses correspond to the perception of a voiced section in the speech signal. Most filled pauses in such languages as English and French are drawls, repetitions of utterances, words, syllables, sounds, and false starts

In addition, a number of other parameters can be shown to influence the occurrence of pauses:

Tempo of Speech is the relative speed or slowness of utterance which is measured by the rate of syllable succession, and the number and duration of pauses in a sentence

• The 40 -odd items in Figure 1, demonstrate the indexical field for fast talking. These attributes come from how people in several corpora talk about fast speech and from research by psychologists and others who have found statistically significant relationships between, say, fast speech and listeners’ perceptions of intelligence. • 5 •

Who talks fast and slow? Kendall (2009) claims that tempo correlates with such things as geographical region, ethnicity, gender and age. In addition, psychologists associate tempo not only to demographic categories such as these but also to personality types and emotions. Having said this, Schnoebelen’s (2009) pilot study of 50 people gave the following answers when asked:

• ‘Who talks fast? ’ • sales people • lawyers • hustlers and con artists • New Yorkers • people in a rush • nervous people • upset people ‘Who talks slowly? ’ • elderly people • teachers • tired people • preacher/priest • doctor

There are units of measurement that are used to measure rate. In the literature we encounter a great variety of tempo denotations such as: vsyllables per second (syll/sec or s/s) vaverage syllable duration (ASD in msec) vphones per second vaverage phone duration (in ms)

VOICE TIMBRE • is the ‘colour’ or ‘tonal quality’ of voice depending on the physiological properties and psychological state of a person

Many words are used to describe timbre. Some are somewhat interchangeable, and some may have slightly different meanings for different musicians, so no attempt will be made to provide definitions. Here a few words commonly used to describe either timbre or tone quality. Reedy Brassy Clear Focussed or unfocussed Breathy (pronounced "BRETH-ee") Rounded Heavy or Light Piercing Strident Harsh Warm Mellow Resonant Dark or Bright Flat