Phonetic Aspects of Silent Pauses in Dialogues: Data from Japanese, Korean, German and French.

本研究分析了日语、韩语、德语和法语中无声停顿的语音相关性。57对同性别的说话者参加了实验。主题互动的角色扮演对话的“请求-拒绝”类型。每一组中的一名受试者被要求扮演一名学生的角色，要求与另一名教授约会，而教授拒绝了他的约会。沉默的停顿和话语的持续时间进行了测量，使用信号编辑器进行声学分析。对转换成对数值的测量数据进行了方差分析和其他相关统计，使用五个因素：语言，性别，角色，停顿和话语的发生。研究结果表明：停顿时长具有语言特异性;停顿时长的使用具有性别依赖性;话语时长也具有语言特异性;停顿时长的使用既具有性别依赖性，又具有角色依赖性。德语中的停顿时长特别长，日语中的停顿时长特别短，只有韩语中的停顿时长存在性别差异。在法语中也观察到语言特定的方面：填充语相当频繁，而与所研究的其他语言相比，停顿较少且较短。最后，停顿的持续时间分布显示了不同类型的功能的存在，这证实了停顿在每种语言的会话策略中的高度显着的权重。

This project consists of an analysis of the phonetic correlates of silent pauses in Japanese, Korean, German and French. Fifty-seven pairs of speakers of the same gender participated to the experiment. Subjects interacted in role-play dialogues of the 'request-refusal' type. A subject in each pair was instructed to play the role of a student asking for an appointment to the other, a professor, who was to refuse it. The corpus totaled 5302 silent pauses. Durations of silent pauses and of utterances were measured for acoustic analysis using signal editors. Analyses of variance and other related statistics have been carried out on measured data converted into logarithmic values, using five factors: language, gender, role, occurrence of pause and of utterance. Results reveal following significant findings: pause duration seem to be language specific; their use is gender dependent ; the utterance durations is also language specific and their use is both of gender and role dependent. Pause duration in turn initial shows the tendency to be especially long in German and short in Japanese, only in Korean the pause duration in turn initial is gender dependent. Language specific aspects are also observed in French: fillers are rather frequent whereas pauses are lesser and shorter compared to other languages examined. Finally the durational distribution of pauses shows the existence of different categories of functions, which confirms the highly significant weight of pauses in conversational strategies for each of languages.