THE EFFECT OF NOUNS AND VERBS ON PAUSING IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE

Oleksandr Ishchenko, Candidate in philology, deputy director for research, NASU Institute of Encyclopedic Research
3 Tereshchenkivska St., Kyiv 01001, Ukraine

E-mail: ishchenko@nas.gov.ua
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8910-111X

Heading: Researches
Language: Ukrainian

Abstract: The study analyzes speech pauses of Ukrainian. The research material is the audio texts of spontaneous conversational speech of customarily pronunciation and intonation, as well as non-spontaneous (read) speech of clear pronunciation and expressive intonation. We show a robust tendency for high frequency of pauses after nouns. It suggests that pausing is like a predictor of nouns. The frequency of pausing after verbs is slightly lower. The probability of pause location after any another part of speech is much lower. Generally, pausing can be occurred after words of any grammatical category. These findings spread virtually equally to both spontaneous conversational speech and non-spontaneous speech (clear intonated reading).

The effect of nouns on pause occurrence may be caused by universal property of the human language. It is recently accepted that nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages. This is because nouns load cognitive processes of the speech production planning more as compared with verbs and other parts. At the same time, some Ukrainian language features also impact the pausing after nouns (these features are characteristic of other Slavic languages too). This is about a prosodic phrasing of Ukrainian according to that interpausal utterances usually are finalized by nouns (rarely by verbs or other principal parts of speech) which get most semantic load.

The pauses do not follow after each noun, because they can be exploited in the speech segmentation in depends on linguistic (linguistic structure of speech), physiological (individuality of speech production, breathing), and psycholingual factors. We suggest that the priming effect as a noun- and verb-inducted psycholingual factor can significantly impact pausing in spoken language.

Statistical measures show the following: 430 ms ±60% is the average pause duration of non-spontaneous clear expressive speech, 355 ms ±50% is the average pause duration of spontaneous customarily speech. Thus, pauses of non-spontaneous speech have a longer duration than of spontaneous speech. This is indicated by both the average pause duration means (ms) and the relative standard deviation of pause durations (±%).

Keywords: expressive speech, spontaneous speech, phonetics, prosody, speech pauses, pausing, prepausal words, nouns, verbs.

REFERENCES

1. Bahmut, A.Y. (1970). Intonational structure of a simple declarative sentence in Slavic languages. Kyiv: Naukova dumka (in Ukr.).
2. Bahmut, A.Y., Borysiuk, I.V. Oliinyk, H.P. (1985). Intonation in spontaneous speech. Kyiv: Naukova dumka (in Ukr.).
3. Bahmut, A.Y., Borysiuk, I.V., Oliinyk, H.P. (1980). Intonation as a manner for speech communication. Kyiv: Naukova dumka (in Ukr.).
4. Borysiuk, I.V. (1990). Intonation forms and functions in spontaneous speech of Ukrainian. Kyiv: Naukova dumka (in Ukr.).
5. Verbych, N.S. (2011). Intonation in persuasive speech of public Lutsk: Teren (in Ukr.).
6. Verbych, N.S. (2013). Speech pauses of scholarly discourses. Kultura slova, 79, 192 – 200 (in Ukr.).
7. Ishchenko, O.S. (2019). Pausing as a prosodic correlate of word classes (on dialects of Ukrainian). Dialekty v synkhronii ta diakhronii (Kyiv, May 23–24, 2019). In print (in Ukr.).
8. Kobyrynka, H.S. (2019). The problems of accentologic terminology. Terminolohichnyi visnyk, 5, 89–97 (in Ukr.).
9. Nykyforenko, I. (2019). About the influence of particles on prosody of German. Proceedings of the Internet conference “The investigation and implementation of modern teaching methods and approaches for studying and learning of foreign languages: linguodidactic, methodological and cultural prospects” (Odesa, March 18, 2019). P. 184–187 (in Ukr.).
10. Bahmut, A.Y. (Ed.). (1977). Typology of speech intonation. Kyiv: Naukova dumka (in Ukr.).
11. Caldecott, M., Czaykowska-Higgins, E., Fortier, K., Koch, K., Leonard, J., Lyon, J. (2018). Pausing as a prosodic correlate of speech units in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish). Canadian Acoustics, 46 (4), 38–41 (in Eng.).
12. Krivokapić, J. (2007). Prosodic planning: Effects of phrasal length and complexity on pause duration. Journal of Phonetics, 35 (2), 172–179. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/wocn.2006.04.001 (in Eng.).
13. Lohmann, A., Conwell, E. (2020). Phonetic effects of grammatical category: How category-specific prosodic phrasing and lexical frequency impact the duration of nouns and verbs. Journal of Phonetics, 78, 100939 (Online early version). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2019.100939 (in Eng.).
14. Ordin, M., Polyanskaya, L., Laka, I., Nespor, M. (2017). Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language. Memory & Cognition, 45, 863–876. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-017-0700-9 (in Eng.).
15. Scheepers, C., Raffray, C., Myachykov, A. (2017). The lexical boost effect is not diagnostic of lexically-specific syntactic representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 95, 102–115. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2017.03.001 (in Eng.).
16. Seifart, F., Strunk, J., Danielsen, S., Hartmann, I., Pakendorf, B., Wichmann, S., Witzlack-Makarevich, A., de Jong, N., Bickel, B. (2018). Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (22), 5720–5725. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/1800708115 (in Eng.).
17. Sorensen, J.M., Cooper, W.E., Paccia, J.M. (1978). Speech timing of grammatical categories. Cognition, 6 (2), 135–153. DOI: https://doi.org/ 1016/0010-0277(78)90019 (in Eng.).
18. Tseng, J., Poppenk, J. (2020). Brain meta-state transitions demarcate thoughts across task contexts exposing the mental noise of trait neuroticism. Nature Communications, 11 (1), 3480. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17255-9 (in Eng.).
19. Wang, C., Xu, Y. (2017). Effects of part of speech: Primitive or derived from word frequency? Proceedings of 8th Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics (Athens, June 19–23, 2017). P. 113–116. DOI: https:// doi.org/36505/ExLing-2017/08/0029/000331 (in Eng.).
20. Watson, D., Breen, M., Gibson, E. (2006). The role of syntactic obligatoriness in the production of intonational boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32 (5), 1045–1056. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/ 0278-7393.32.5.1045 (in Eng.).
21. Wightman, C.W., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M., Price, P.J. (1992). Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 91 (3), 1707–1717. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1121/ 402450 (in Eng.).