Finding Structure in Silence: The Role of Pauses in Aligning Speaker Expectations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how pauses in speech serve as a universal, time-invariant template that helps speakers align expectations and maintain predictability in conversation, across languages and developmental stages.

Contribution

It demonstrates that pauses act as a structural signal supporting speech intelligibility by providing a memoryless, predictable pattern in spoken language.

Findings

Pause distributions are memoryless in English and Korean.

Pauses facilitate initial structuring and ongoing predictability of speech.

Pause properties change predictably with speaker experience.

Abstract

The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose that speaker alignment is supported by the statistical structure of spoken signals and show how pauses offer a time-invariant template for structuring speech sequences. Consistent with this, we show that pause distributions in conversational English and Korean provide a memoryless information source. We describe how this can facilitate both the initial structuring and maintenance of predictability in spoken signals over time, and show how the properties of this signal change predictably with speaker experience. These results indicate that pauses provide a structuring signal that interacts with the morphological and rhythmical structure of languages, allowing speakers at all stages of lifespan development to distinguish signal from noise and maintain mutual predictability in time.