No abstract

The historical provenance of a minimum cutoff point (of about 0.25 sec) for pauses in temporal analyses of speech production is associated with Goldman-Eisler's usage. Her rationale was the predominance of articulatory pauses at lengths shorter than 0.25 sec. Both phonotactic facts and empirical analysis of several corpora of readings disconfirm this predominance with respect to pauses 0.13-0.25 sec in length. The vast majority of these pauses are found to be psychological; they are determined by syntax, punctuation, rhetorical and expressive emphasis, poetic format, and stylistic pecularities. * The research on political speeches reported in the following has been supported by a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Habilitationsstipendium granted to Sabine Kowal.

Clark and Fox Tree (2002) have presented empirical evidence, based primarily on the London-Lund corpus (LL; Svartvik & Quirk, 1980), that the fillers uh and um are conventional English words that signal a speaker's intention to initiate a minor and a major delay, respectively. We present here empirical analyses of uh and um and of silent pauses (delays) immediately following them in six media interviews of Hillary Clinton. Our evidence indicates that uh and um cannot serve as signals of upcoming delay, let alone signal it differentially: In most cases, both uh and um were not followed by a silent pause, that is, there was no delay at all; the silent pauses that did occur after um were too short to be counted as major delays; finally, the distributions of durations of silent pauses after uh and um were almost entirely overlapping and could therefore not have served as reliable predictors for a listener. The discrepancies between Clark and Fox Tree's findings and ours are largely a consequence of the fact that their LL analyses reflect the perceptions of professional coders, whereas our data were analyzed by means of acoustic measurements with the PRAAT software (www.praat.org). A comparison of our findings with those of O'Connell, Kowal, and Ageneau (2005) did not corroborate the hypothesis of Clark and Fox Tree that uh and um are interjections: Fillers occurred typically in initial, interjections in medial positions; fillers did not constitute an integral turn by themselves, whereas interjections did; fillers never initiated cited speech, whereas interjections did; and fillers did not signal emotion, whereas interjections did. Clark and Fox Tree's analyses were embedded within a theory of ideal delivery that we find inappropriate for the explication of these phenomena.

A total of 18 experimental corpora of spontaneous speech in five languages (English, Finnish, French, German, and Spanish) were examined under the hypothesis that they are characterized by commonalities in the use of time. Each study was based on the same speech type, story telling elicited by pictorial materials. The temporal measures were speech and articulation rates, pause duration, phrase length, and percentage of pause time/total time. The hypothesis was confirmed except for studies carried out with identifiably variant methodologies. Further support for the hypothesis was found by contrasting the use of time characteristic of interviewees' speech.