Striatal cholinergic interneurons pause their ongoing firing in response to sensory stimuli that have acquired meaning as a signal for learned behavior. In slices, these cells exhibit both spontaneous activity patterns and spontaneous pauses very similar to those seen in vivo. The mechanisms responsible for ongoing firing and spontaneous pauses were studied in striatal slices using perforated p...

The paper focuses on silent pauses observed in the productions of subjects involved in simultaneous interpreting tasks. Four bilingual subjects with various degrees of expertise in interpreting and various degrees of mastery of the languages involved (French and Spanish) have been recorded while interpreting utterances of French and Spanish talks. The source discourses had been perturbated by c...

Filled pauses have important and varied functions in turntaking behavior, and better understanding of this relationship opens new ways for improving the quality and naturalness of dialogue systems. We use a corpus of collaborative task oriented dialogues to provide new insights into the relationship between filled pauses and turn-taking based on temporal and acoustic features. We then explore w...

Cardiac pacing remains one of the most effective means for preventing torsade de pointes in patients with long QT syndrome (LQTS). However, fatal arrhythmias may occur despite combined therapy with beta blockers and pacing, and it is possible that failure of cardiac pacing for preventing arrhythmias in the long run is related (at least in part) to suboptimal pacemaker programming. Preventing su...

Infant response times were calculated from the end of the mother’s utterance until the start of the infant’s vocalization. Maternal response times were calculated from the end of the infant’s vocalization until the start of the mother’s utterance. Negative response times indicate that the vocalization starts in overlap with the vocalization of the interaction partner. Within turn pauses are the...

This paper presents the work done to annotate a corpus of spoken Danish with information structure tags, and describes a preliminary study in which the corpus has been used to investigate the relation between focus and intra-clausal pauses. The study indicates that the pauses that do fall within the focus domain, tend to precede property-expressing words by which the object in focus is distingu...

PURPOSE To analyze speech expressiveness in a group of executives based on perceptive and acoustic aspects of vocal dynamics. METHODS Four male subjects participated in the research study (S1, S2, S3, and S4). The assessments included the Kingdomality test to obtain the keywords of communicative attitudes; perceptive-auditory assessment to characterize vocal quality and dynamics, performed by...

Modified action demonstration—dubbed motionese— has been proposed as a way to help children recognize the structure and meaning of actions. However, until now, it investigated only in young infants. This brief research report presents findings from cross-sectional study parental demonstrations three groups 8–11, 12–23, 24–30-month-old that applied seven motionese parameters; second youngest gro...

For many applications in human-computer interaction, it is desirable to predict between-(gaps) and within-(pauses) speaker silences independently of automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this study, we focus a dataset of 6 dyadic task-based interactions and aim at automatic discrimination of gaps and pauses based on f0, energy and glottal parameters derived from the speech just preceding the s...

Temporal variables were detailed and compared in a text read by ten French subjects with mild to moderate Parkinson disease (PDS’s) and ten French healthy control subjects (CS’s). Longer total pause times were found for PDS’s, correlated to higher numbers of pauses and longer mean pause duration. The typical relationship observed between the distributional scheme of pauses and syntactic structu...