Characteristics of pausing in normal, fast and cluttered speech

ABSTRACT

One of the main symptoms of cluttering is atypical pausing. However, there is little information about what this atypical pausing means, because typical speakers also have pauses not only at syntactic boundaries, but also within syntactic structures, and even within words. The aim of this study is to analyse how pausing strategies of persons who clutter (PWCs) differ from pausing strategies of normal speakers and speakers with exceptionally rapid speech (ERSs). Results show that there is a difference between the groups in the frequency and/or duration of pauses and the place of their occurrences. ERSs have less and longer pauses than PWCs and control speakers. There is difference between PWCs and control speakers only in the duration of pauses. The results contribute to the assessment, diagnosis, and therapy of cluttering.

KEYWORDS:

• Cluttering
• exceptionally rapid speech
• hesitation
• pausing

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Mária Gósy, Dora Kós-Dienes and Zsófia Koren-Dienes for their help in preparing this paper. The author would like to thank also the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and for their valuable work with this manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The author reports no conflict of interest. A poster of a portion of these data was presented at the 2^nd World Conference on Cluttering of the International Cluttering Association, but the poster involved the status report of a portion of the data, and no paper has been submitted for the Proceedings of the Conference.