The Effect of Pause Insertion on the Temporal Structure of Articulation

本研究的目的是探讨插入句内停顿对话语时间组织的影响。结果表明，插入语内停顿对话语的直接听觉区有显著影响，表现为“听觉延长”。研究还表明，停顿内的停顿会使话语其余部分的时间组织发生微小的变化，尽管这些微小变化的确切位置和程度因说话者而异。停顿前的延长被详细地研究，结果发现，在日语中，停顿前的延长主要发生在紧接在停顿之前的莫拉。有趣的是，还发现，在一些发言者，停顿前延长延长超过两个moras。然而，额外的莫拉的延长远小于即刻的莫拉。研究结果还表明，元音承担了日语中的主要负担，特别是关于立即前pausa莫拉。

The aim of the present study is to clarify the effects of the insertion of an intra-sentential pause on the temporal organization of an utterance.A Japanese test sentence, with a possible pause location at a major syntactic boundary roughly in the middle of the sentence, was produced by native speakers under two contrasting conditions, i.e.with and without an intra-sentential pause, and the durational properties of the utterances were analyzed acoustically.The results indicated that the insertion of an intra-sentential pause has a major effect on the immediately-prepausal region of an utterance in the form of so-called 'prepausal lengthening'. It was also indicated that an intra-sentential pause brings about minor changes in the temporal organization of the remaining parts of the utterance, although the exact location and the extent of these minor changes varied from speaker to speaker.Pre-pausal lengthening was examined in detail, and it was found that, in Japanese, it occurs primarily in the mora that immediately precedes a pause. Interestingly it was also found that, in some speakers, pre-pausal lengthening extends over two moras. The lengthening of an additional mora was, however, substantially smaller than that of the immediately-prepausal mora. The results also revealed that the vowels bear the major burden of lengthening in Japanese, especialy as concerns the immediately pre-pausa mora.