Pausing strategies in discourse in dutch

Abstract

The paper describes an experiment in which the different pausing strategies in discourse in Dutch were investigated. Spontaneous discourses were recorded from four male and four female native Dutch speakers. Silent and filled pauses were located in the speech signal, as well as lengthened words. These were subsequently related to different discourse structures, obtained independently from prosodic features. Results show that there are basically three different types of pausing: silent pauses, filled pauses, and lengthening of words. Speakers apply these means in different ways to achieve pausing, by using one specific pause type or a combination of more than one. The way of applying pausing is rather uniform within one speaker, whereas the choice of a particular strategy is largely speaker dependent.