| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,200,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This project consists of an analysis of the phonetic correlates of silent pauses in Japanese, Korean, German and French. Fifty-seven pairs of speakers of the same gender participated to the experiment. Subjects interacted in role-play dialogues of the 'request-refusal' type. A subject in each pair was instructed to play the role of a student asking for an appointment to the other, a professor, who was to refuse it. The corpus totaled 5302 silent pauses. Durations of silent pauses and of utterances were measured for acoustic analysis using signal editors. Analyses of variance and other related statistics have been carried out on measured data converted into logarithmic values, using five factors: language, gender, role, occurrence of pause and of utterance. Results reveal following significant findings: pause duration seem to be language specific; their use is gender dependent ; the utterance durations is also language specific and their use is both of gender and role dependent. Pause duration in turn initial shows the tendency to be especially long in German and short in Japanese, only in Korean the pause duration in turn initial is gender dependent. Language specific aspects are also observed in French: fillers are rather frequent whereas pauses are lesser and shorter compared to other languages examined. Finally the durational distribution of pauses shows the existence of different categories of functions, which confirms the highly significant weight of pauses in conversational strategies for each of languages.
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