Academic literature on the topic 'Pause hesitation'

A long-remembered scene repeated many times: I am about sixteen; it is 5:45 P.M. and we are at the dinner table, with my mother at one end, my father at the other, and my twelve-year-old sister, Judy, sitting across from me. As always, the meal is formal—the oval mahogany table is covered with a clean tablecloth and there are three courses: appetizer, main course, dessert. And as always we are eating very quickly to keep up with my father, who must be back at the office at six to see more patients. The phone rings; I can hear our maid, Josephine, going to answer it. A pause. Then Josephine comes into the dining room. “It’s Dr. Williams,” she tells my father. My mother is annoyed. “Why does he always call at dinnertime?” she asks, but my father is already on the way to the phone. Dr. Williams and my father, both practicing physicians, occasionally meet at Passaic General Hospital, but Dr. Williams, who has heart problems, is also my father’s patient, and that is why he is calling. He knows that my father puts his patients ahead of his dinner. Soon, my father returns to snatch a hasty bite of dessert and tells my mother, “I’ll be going to Rutherford after office hours tonight. I should be back around ten.” My mother says nothing. Another scene, equally well remembered: My father and I are in a car, and he is driving; I am not yet old enough for a license. He speaks tome in that tentative, half-apprehensive tone of voice that fathers use to-ward adolescent sons when they are about to propose something new.“You know that I have a patient, Dr. Williams, over in Rutherford? Well he’s beginning to go blind and needs somebody to read to him once a week for an hour or two. I told him I would ask you—he would pay you for your time.”From my hesitation, my father knows that I am not liking the idea.“You would enjoy reading to Dr. Williams,” he continues. “He’s a very interesting man. He writes poetry.”

The paper addresses the overall distribution of speech disfluencies in Russian spoken monologic discourse: basing on corpus data, we investigate qualitatively and quantitatively how disfluencies of different types group (or do not group) with each other and how isolated disfluencies and their sequences are sandwiched with periods of fluent speech in the course of speech production. Self-repairs, filled and silent pauses, and instances of hesitation lengthening were annotated in a subcorpus of the “Russian Pears Chats and Stories” (RUPEX). A distribution-oriented typology of disfluencies was pr