Silent and Non-Silent Pauses in Three Speech Styles

The frequency, duration and distribution of pauses in French were investigated acoustically in three types of speech styles: political interviews and casual interviews, which belong to spontaneous speech, and political speeches, which are carefully prepared. The speech samples were subdivided into articulated sequences, silent pauses, and non-silent pauses. The total time of silent pauses was 50% greater in political speeches than in either type of interview. It appears to be one of the characteristics of political speeches. In all three styles, the distribution of silent pauses was generally correlated with the syntactic structure of the sentence. Most of the time, these pauses occurred at clause or phrase boundaries. In political speeches, however, their frequency was greater and their duration longer. Some of these pauses, particularly the long ones, must have a predominantly stylistic function. In interviews, non-silent pauses were frequent and long, particularly in casual interviews, whereas they were almost completely absent in political speeches. These results confirm previous studies that involve other languages as well, and investigate the syntactic distribution of pauses and the importance of hesitation in spontaneous speech; they open onto a new research area concerned with the stylistic function of pauses.