An Exploratory Study on Pause Features in Spontaneous Speech for Parkinson’s Disease Detection

Background/Objectives: Dysprosody is a common feature of Parkinson’s disease (PD), yet pause-related abnormalities in Mandarin spontaneous speech remain undercharacterized. This study examined whether spontaneous speech reveals more pronounced prosodic differences than structured reading. Methods: Speech recordings were obtained from 33 Mandarin speakers (16 PD, 17 HC) during short-sentence reading, long-sentence reading, and free-speech tasks. Prosodic features describing pitch, intensity, and pausing were extracted and compared between groups using a nonparametric framework. Subject-level classification was performed as an exploratory validation, comprising single-task classification, decision-level fusion of task probabilities, feature ablation contrasting pause-only and non-pause feature subsets, and cross-corpus evaluation against a Spanish PD corpus. Results: Mean pause duration, pause-duration variability, and pause-to-speech ratio were significantly higher in the PD group after false-discovery-rate correction in both corpora. Free speech was more discriminative than structured reading, multi-task fusion did not clearly improve performance over free speech alone, and pause-only features retained strong discriminative performance. Conclusions: Pause-related measures from spontaneous speech are therefore candidate research markers of PD with preliminary cross-linguistic consistency, whereas the classification results remain exploratory. Larger independent cohorts with detailed clinical and cognitive measures are needed to confirm these findings before clinical applicability can be considered.