Pausing Strategies In Discourse In Dutch

This paper describes an experiment in which the different pausing strategies in discourse in Dutch were investigated. Spontaneous discourses were recorded from four male and four female native Dutch speakers. Silent and filled pauses were located in the speech signal, as well as lengthened words. These were subsequently related to different discourse structures, obtained independently from prosodic features. Results show that there are basically three different types of pausing: silent pauses, filled pauses, and lengthening of words. Speakers apply these means in different ways to achieve pausing, by using one specific pause type or a combination of more than one. The way of applying pausing is rather uniform within one speaker, whereas the choice of a particular strategy is largely speaker dependent

Number And Duration Of Spoken Utterances Of Deaf And Normally Hearing Children Between Twelve And Eighteen Months - Some preliminary results

Several studies about the speech development of deaf children suggest that their speech development differs from that of normally hearing children. To establish in which respect this development differs and from what age onwards, the spoken utterances of deaf and normally hearing children from 12.5 until 17.5 months of age are studied. This paper reports about some preliminary results of a study on the total number of spoken utterances in a 10-minutes period of monthly recordings and on the average duration of 50 utterances in the speech of deaf and normally hearing children. It became clear that at this age there are already some differences between deaf and normally hearing children. 1 Introduction Many studies indicate that the auditory perception influences the production of speech as early as in the first year of life. This is concluded along studies that compared the speech of normally hearing children with that of hearing impaired children. It seems that already early in the sp..