A Statistical Analysis of On-Off Patterns in 16 Conversations

This is a summary of data from an extensive analysis of on-off speech patterns in 16 experimental telephone conversations. The on-off patterns are determined by a fixed threshold speech detector having certain rules for rejecting noise and for filling in short gaps (for example, from stop consonants). Distributions are obtained for ten events, including talk-spurts, pauses, double talking (simultaneous speech from both parties), mutual silence, etc. Particular emphasis is placed on events surrounding interruptions. The entire analysis is performed for three speech detector thresholds, since most of the data are strongly influenced by choice of threshold. Observations are made about the influence of threshold on the data, properties of speech invariant with choice of threshold, and differences between male and female speech patterns.