Pausing in Swedish spontaneous speech

Pauses in spontaneous speech have a less restricted distribution than pauses in read discourse; however, they are not distributed in a haphazard way. The majority of the perceived pauses in the examined Swedish spontaneous speech material, 73%, occurred in one of the following positions: between sentences, after discourse markers and conjunctions, and before accented content words. There is a range of acoustic correlates of perceived pauses in spontaneous speech, such as silent intervals, hesitation sounds, prepausal lengthening, glottalization and specific F0 patterns. The acoustic manifestation of a pause, e.g. the duration of the pause and the F0 pattern associated with the pause, is to some extent dependent on the pause’s position and function.