We talk about "boundaries of intonation units" and that language is a "code". And if we go in the direction of "categorial perceptions" and "motor theories," could it be expected that speech pauses (rather hesitations than breath pauses) can draw attention to the listener and thus promote the performance of remembrance? At which point could one expect a discriminating point at the pause length in relation to the rate of articulation? Imagine a Morse Code, e.g. SOS: We say three times short, three times long, three times short, but nobody talks about the silence between the individual units, right? Someone in distress at sea might have a different frequency of all units including pauses than someone on a deserted island who has been sending this code for weeks or months. How does the receiver discriminate between the individual units (in these cases, of course, we hope that there is a receiver at all ;-) ) and how does he know that it is an SOS signal? Can this model-like idea be applied to the language? And does it make any sense to think about the long-term memory? Or does it only concern the short-term memory and what is actually stored in the brain are generated emotions?
In Morse code, pauses make fulfilling the
Fano condition is possible. No code is
prefix of another one.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fano-Bedingung
On the significance of pauses in mental representation:
http://sciencev1.orf.at/science/news/87005
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Punkt-und-Komma-im-Gehirn-3431021.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10590479_Representation_of_Action_Sequence_Boundaries_by_Macaque_Prefrontal_Cortical_Neurons
It might be that pauses are an operator that
says: "process the content of working memory", or
"Make a chunk out of the current WM content".
Like in Reverse Polish Notation: (A + B) * C
can be written like: A B + C *
In this example the * at the end says:
take (the) two elements from the top of
the stack (assuming a binary operator)
and multiply them, then push the result
back onto the stack.
Regards,
Joachim
Article Representation of Action Sequence Boundaries by Macaque Pref...
I think that it is pretty standard for experienced public speakers to know that a distinct pause before (or between) important words can call attention to them.
Hauke: I understood your question to be mostly about the role and physical characterisation of silent pauses, but if you’re looking into filled pauses too, this article of mine and the references I quote there may be of some relevance.
‘Fluent mumbles and precise vagueness’:
http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/06/fluent-mumbles-and-precise-vagueness.html
All my best for your research
Madalena
Hi, we wrote a whole series of papers which investigate this issue, looking at disfluent "er", repetition, and silence (in English). In brief, "er" and silence increase recognition memory for words which follow disfluencies (Corley, MacGregor, and Donaldson, 2007; MacGregor, Corley, and Donaldson, 2010); repetitions do not (MacGregor, Corley, and Donaldson, 2009). In the case of "er" and silence, there is an associated attenuation of an N400 ERP effect at the target word, suggesting that people's expectations about what they will hear have been affected. Importantly, Collard, Corley, MacGregor and Donaldson (2008) use a P300 ERP paradigm to show that this altered expectation is accompanied by an attentional modulation (as you suggest above).
A synthetic view of these studies might be that disfluency is detected when the signal becomes "non-linguistic" (hence not repetitions), and acts as a signal that the speaker is unlikely to utter a predictable word (N400 modulation). This causes the listener to heighten attention to the signal (reliance on bottom-up information; P300 modulation), resulting in a greater recognition memory for the subsequent (target) word.
Hope that helps!
--MC
Hello Martin! Wow! Great work! That´s exactly what I´m looking for! Thank you very much!
-Hauke
Many years ago a researcher named Jon Eisenson postulated that disfluency was most likely to occur at a junction of highest linguistic importance in the string of words. This, to me, is still a very useful way to categorize a response. Pauses occur at times of planning, of indecision, of emphasis, and for other reasons. There is much in the stuttering literature which might be of interest to you.
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