The frequency, duration and distribution of pauses in French were investigated acoustically in three types of speech styles: political interviews and casual interviews, which belong to spontaneous speech, and political speeches, which are carefully prepared. The speech samples were subdivided into articulated sequences, silent pauses, and non-silent pauses. The total time of silent pauses was 50% greater in political speeches than in either type of interview. It appears to be one of the characteristics of political speeches. In all three styles, the distribution of silent pauses was generally correlated with the syntactic structure of the sentence. Most of the time, these pauses occurred at clause or phrase boundaries. In political speeches, however, their frequency was greater and their duration longer. Some of these pauses, particularly the long ones, must have a predominantly stylistic function. In interviews, non-silent pauses were frequent and long, particularly in casual interviews, whereas they were almost completely absent in political speeches. These results confirm previous studies that involve other languages as well, and investigate the syntactic distribution of pauses and the importance of hesitation in spontaneous speech; they open onto a new research area concerned with the stylistic function of pauses.

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The perception of silent pauses in continuous speech was investigated experimentally in three genres: political speeches, political interviews and casual interviews. Normal and inverted speech yielded similar perception. The result is interpreted as being an indicator of the salient role of the prosodic structures. The distributional patterning of pauses proves to be responsible for the variability of perception. Pause duration is the essential parameter; pause identification rate is positively correlated with it, and it interacts with the parameter values of the vowel preceding the pause.

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Objectives: The present study had 2 main objectives: (1) examine the effect of Parkinson’s disease (PD) on vowel and consonant duration in French read speech and (2) investigate whether the durational contrasts of consonants and vowels are maintained or compromised. Results: The data indicated that the consonant durations were shortened in Parkinsonian speech (PS), compared to control speech (CS). However, this shortening was consonant dependent: unvoiced occlusives and fricatives were significantly shortened compared to other consonant categories. All vowels were slightly longer in PS than in CS, however, the observed differences were below the level of significance. Despite significant shortening of some consonant categories, the general pattern of intrinsic duration was maintained in PS. There was slightly less agreement for vowels with the normal contrast of intrinsic durations, possibly because vowel durational contrasts are more sensitive to PD disorders. Conclusion: Most PD patients tended to maintain the intrinsic duration contrasts of both vowels and consonants, suggesting that low-level articulatory constraints operate in a similar way and with the same weight in PS and CS.