Pausid kõnes
Pauses in Speech

Summary/Abstract: In speech the primary function of pauses is regulation of the syntactic division or prosodic phrasing with an aim to facilitate the comprehension of utterances. Also, pauses are an important factor contributing to speech rhythm. For the present study, recordings of different types of texts were analysed in order to model the durations and positions of pauses in fluent speech for Estonian text-to-speech synthesis. It was found that different pause positions such as phrase-, sentence- and paragraph-final ones can indeed be distinguished by pause length. Thus, statistical models can be created for pause durations and positions in speech flow. No statistically relevant model could, however, be developed for prognosis of final lengthenings. Those will evidently have to be handled within models of sound duration. The results just reported can be regarded as one of the first moves enabling Estonian speech synthesis to pass from rule-based generation of prosody to the use of statistical models.

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