Pausing strategies in dialogue speech: the interlocutor factor

Abstract

In everyday conversations, speakers tend to adapt their voices in order to fit the communication situation. One of the factors that seems to influence speech variability is the interlocutor factor: it has been shown that some linguistic features of our speech are dependent on who we are talking to. In our previous work, we observed interlocutor-related changes in speech tempo and frequency of non-speech events. In this research, we are presenting data on interlocutor-induced variability in within-turn pausing strategies, involving frequency of silent intervals, filled pauses and prosodic boundaries, as well as overall percentage of time taken by silent intervals in speech. The results were obtained using the large annotated speech corpus SibLing where each of the 20 core speakers participated in 5 dialogue settings: with a sibling, a friend, 2 strangers (a male and a female), and a person of elder age whose job requires leadership skills.