The present dissertation focuses on the question whether and under which conditions infants recognise clauses in fluent speech and the role a prosodic marker such as a pause may have in the segmentation process. In the speech signal, syntactic clauses often coincide with intonational phrases (IPhs) (Nespor & Vogel, 1986, p. 190), the boundaries of which are marked by changes in fundamental frequency (e.g., Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel & Fong, 1991), lengthening of the final syllable (e.g., Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980) and the occurrence of a pause (Nespor & Vogel, 1986, p. 188). Thus, IPhs seem to be reliably marked in the speech stream and infants may use these cues to recognise them. Furthermore, corpus studies on the occurrence and distribution of pauses have revealed that there is a strong correlation between the duration of a pause and the type of boundary it marks (e.g., Butcher, 1981, for German). Pauses between words are either non-existent or short, pauses between phrases are a bit longer, and pauses between clauses and at sentence boundaries further increase in duration. This suggests the existence of a natural pause hierarchy that complements the prosodic hierarchy described by Nespor and Vogel (1986). These hierarchies on the side of the speech signal correspond to the syntactic hierarchy of a language. In the present study, five experiments using the Headturn preference paradigm (Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss & Kennedy, 1987) were conducted to investigate German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds’ use of pauses to recognise clauses in the signal and their sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy. Previous studies on English-learning infants’ recognition of clauses (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987; Nazzi, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk & Jusczyk, 2000) have found that infants as young as 6 months recognise clauses in fluent speech. Recently, Seidl and colleagues have begun to investigate the status the pause may have in this process (Seidl, 2007; Johnson & Seidl, 2008; Seidl & Cristià, 2008). However, none of these studies investigated infants’ sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy and especially the sensitivity to the correlation between pause durations and the respective within-sentence clause boundaries / sentence boundaries. To address these questions highly controlled stimuli were used. In all five experiments the stimuli were sentences consisting of two IPhs which each coincided with a syntactic clause. In the first three experiments pauses were inserted either at clause and sentence boundaries or within the first clause and the sentence boundaries. The duration of the pauses varied between the experiments. The results show that German-learning 6-month-olds recognise clauses in the speech stream, but only in a condition in which the duration of the pauses conforms to the mean duration of pauses found at the respective boundaries in German. Experiments 4 and 5 explicitly addressed the question of infants’ sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy by inserting pauses at the clause and sentence boundaries only. Their durations were either conforming to the natural pause hierarchy or were being reversed. The results of these experiments provide evidence that 8-, but not 6-month-olds seem to be sensitive to the correlation of the duration of pauses and the type of boundary they demarcate. The present study provides first evidence that infants not only use pauses to recognise clause and sentence boundaries, but are sensitive to the duration and distribution of pauses in their native language as reflected in the natural pause hierarchy. / Die vorliegende Dissertation geht der Frage nach, ob und ab wann Deutsch lernende Kinder in der Lage sind, Clauses in gesprochener Sprache zu erkennen und welche Rolle dabei ein prosodischer Marker wie die Pause spielen kann. Im Sprachstrom sind syntaktische Clauses oft durch Intonationsphrasen (IPhs) repräsentiert (Nespor & Vogel, 1986). Die Grenzen solcher IPhs werden markiert durch Veränderungen in der Grundfrequenz (z.B., Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel & Fong, 1991), die Längung der grenzfinalen Silbe (z.B., Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980) und das Vorhandensein einer Pause (Nespor & Vogel, 1986, p. 188). Man kann also davon ausgehen, dass die Grenzen von IPhs zuverlässig markiert sind und Kleinkinder diese Hinweisreize zu deren Wahrnehmung nutzen. Ein weiterer Hinweis ist die Dauer einer Pause, die systematisch mit der Art der Grenze korreliert an der sie vorkommt (z.B., Butcher, 1981, fürs Deutsche). Es finden sich kaum oder gar keine Pausen zwischen Wörtern, etwas längere Pausen an Phrasengrenzen, noch längere Pausen an Clausegrenzen und die längsten Pausen an Satzgrenzen. Das legt die Existenz einer Natürlichen Pausenhierarchie nahe, die die prosodische Hierarchie (Nespor & Vogel, 1986) auf der Seite des Sprachsignals ergänzt. Diese prosodischen Hierarchien korrespondieren mit der syntaktischen Hierarchie einer Sprache. In der vorliegenden Studie werden fünf Experimente präsentiert, die mittels der Headturn Preference Methode (Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss & Kennedy, 1987) durchgeführt wurden. Die Fragestellung war, ob Deutsch lernende 6 und 8 Monate alte Kinder Pausen nutzen, um Clauses im Sprachstrom zu erkennen und ob sie bereits sensitiv für die natürliche Pausenhierarchie sind. Vorläuferstudien (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987; Nazzi, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk & Jusczyk, 2000) haben gezeigt, dass bereits 6 Monate alte Englisch lernende Kinder Clauses in der Sprache erkennen. Erstmals haben Seidl und Mitarbeiterinnen (Seidl, 2007; Johnson & Seidl, 2008; Seidl & Cristià, 2008) den Status der Pause in diesem Zusammenhang näher untersucht. Keine der genannten Studien hat jedoch die Sensitivität von Kindern gegenüber der natürlichen Pausenhierarchie und besonders die Sensitivität gegenüber der Korrelation von Pausendauer und Clause-, bzw. Satzgrenzen erforscht. Um dieser Frage nachzugehen, wurde in der vorliegenden Studie ein hoch kontrolliertes Stimulusmaterial verwendet: Sätze die aus zwei IPhs bestehen, welche jeweils einem syntaktischen Clause entsprechen. In den ersten drei Experimenten wurden Pausen zum einen an den Clause- und den Satzgrenzen und zum anderen innerhalb der ersten Clauses und an den Satzgrenzen eingefügt. Die Dauer der Pausen variierte zwischen den Experimenten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass 6 Monate alte Kinder in der Lage sind, Clauses in gesprochener Sprache zu erkennen, aber nur ein einer Bedingung, in der die eingefügten Pausen eine Dauer hatten, die mit der natürlichen Sprache übereinstimmte. In den Experimenten 4 und 5 wurde explizit getestet, inwieweit die Kinder sensitiv gegenüber der natürlichen Pausenhierarchie sind. Dafür wurden Pausen nur noch an den Clause- und den Satzgrenzen eingefügt, die jeweilige Dauer der Pausen entsprach dabei einmal der Pausenhierarchie, zum anderen widersprachen sie ihr. Die Ergebnisse der beiden Experimente zeigen, dass 8 Monate alte Kinder, nicht jedoch 6 Monate alte Kinder, sensitiv für die Verbindung von Pausendauer und der jeweiligen prosodisch/syntaktischen Grenze sind. Die Ergebnisse der Dissertation zeigen erstmals, dass Kinder Pausen nicht nur nutzen, um Clauses in gesprochener Sprache zu erkennen, sondern dass sie auch sensitiv gegenüber Pausendauer und Pausenverteilung in ihrer Muttersprache sind und damit gegenüber der Natürlichen Pausenhierarchie.

<p>Recordings of speech play a central role in the diverse subdisciplines of linguistics. The reliance on speech recordings is especially profound in sociolinguistics, where scholars have developed a range of techniques for eliciting and analyzing natural talk. Despite the focus on naturalistic speech data, sociolinguists have rarely focused explicitly on the management (e.g. organization, storage, accessibility, and preservation) of their data, and this lack of focus has had consequences for the advancement of the field. At the same time, the interviews that sociolinguists labor so hard to obtain are often barely mined for their full potential to further our understanding of language. That is, sociolinguists often focus on a handful of phonological and/or morphosyntactic variables to the exclusion of so many other features of speech. The present work both addresses the management of sociolinguistic data and, through an innovative approach to speech data management and analysis, extends the sociolinguistic lens to include the lesser-examined realm of variation in sequential temporal patterns of talk.</p><p>The first part of this dissertation describes the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP), a web-based digitization and preservation initiative at North Carolina State University. SLAAP, which I principally have designed and developed, is more than an archive; it has actively sought to explicate approaches to spoken language data management and to enrich spoken language data through the development of analytic tools designed specifically for sociolinguistic analysis. This dissertation begins by situating SLAAP within the history of data management practices in the field of sociolinguistics. It then provides an overview of many of SLAAP's features, discussing in particular the transcript model that enables most of its analytic and presentational capabilities.</p><p>The second part of this dissertation takes advantage of SLAAP's data model and the extensive language data accumulated within its archive to examine variation in speech rate and silent pause duration by North American English speakers of four ethnicities in North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Washington, DC, and Newfoundland. This work brings a wide range of previous research from different areas of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics to bear on an array of quantitative analyses, demonstrating that speech rate and pause exhibit meaningful variation at the social level at the same time as they are also constrained by cognitive and articulatory processes. </p><p>Specifically, pause and speech rate are shown to vary by region, ethnicity, and gender - albeit not in mono-directional ways - although other factors arise as significant, including, for speech rate, a strong effect of utterance length as well as a number of interactional or discourse-related factors, such as the gender of the interviewer and the number of participants in the speech event. A number of the examinations undertaken relate sociolinguistic conceptions of style to language production and cognitive processes, including a quantitative analysis of sequential temporal patterns as paralinguistic cues to attention to speech, performativity, and the realization of phonological and morphosyntactic variables. Through this analysis, sociolinguistic data and findings are brought to bear on a tradition of psycholinguistic investigations with the hope to benefit both, often disparate, areas of research.</p> / Dissertation

The aim of this research was to investigate the breathing patterns of children aged 5-9 years with asthma as they read aloud stories of increasingly difficulty. Participants were 11 children diagnosed with moderate to severe asthma recruited from an out-patient clinic and 11 gender- and age-matched controls recruited from local schools. Non-contact respiratory monitoring methods were employed to yield acoustic recordings during three non-reading tasks and three reading aloud tasks which increased in difficulty. Measurements included breathing rate, pause time in speech, and time ratio between inspiration between inspiration and expiration (I/E ratio). Pauses that occurred during the reading tasks were classified as either occurring at grammatical junctions where pausing during oral reading would be expected, or at ungrammatical junctions, where pausing was associated with either needing to breath, a reading mistake and/or upon recognition of an unknown word. The acoustic measures were recorded using a free audio editor and recorder programme (Audacity version 2.0.3’) on a Notebook laptop with an inbuilt microphone. The main result indicated that 82% of children with asthma breathed more slowly when reading books that were difficult for them, and this was negatively associated with asthma severity (p=0.046). The findings demonstrated that children with asthma appear to cope when reading more difficult materials by breathing more slowly, pausing for longer ([F(1, 16) = 5.454, p = 0.033]) and increasing expiration time. The current research is the first of its kind and provides a base for future studies to investigate the relationship between breathing and the reading of children with asthma. Questions remain whether this relationship is related to low achievement in reading. Future research to confirm, disconfirm or otherwise is necessary to add to the sparse literature on the breathing of children with asthma while reading aloud.

The particular characteristics of Pinter’s theatre such as the theme of violence, the competitive interpersonal relationships, the implied unwillingness in communication between the characters and the distinctive use of silences and pauses, distinguish his work from the writers of the absurd. Pinter makes particular use of “Silences” and “Pauses” as theatrical techniques that present a non-verbal way of communication in his plays. The frequent use of these particular techniques in Pinter’s dialogue has urged some critics to coin new expressions such as “Pinteresque” or “Pinter Pause” in the vocabulary of drama to specify Pinter’s technique. One of the important objectives in this essay is to point out the fundamental significance and function of the “Silences” and “Pauses” in Pinter’s work and point out their distinction. I will discuss how the silences and pauses function in Pinter’s theatre as a non-verbal way of communication by creating fragments in the dialogue.   The plays which will be analyzed in this essay are: The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. My objective in this essay is to explore the context of these plays with regards to the theme of menace. In the first chapter, I mainly aim to explore the menacing context of these plays regarding the structure of menace and the ways it takes place in each play separately. This analysis will be presented in relation to the spatial territory in which the characters are confined. My aim is also to describe why menace is presented in a theatrical sense. I have chosen to quote some significant passages of each play in each section to illustrate my purposes in the first chapter. The aim of the second chapter is to define the character types involved in the presentation of menace, “The Intruders” and “The Victims”, and to analyze the strategies their use in encounters with each other. After describing the character types I will explore in detail how “The Intruders” use linguistic strategies to confuse and subdue their victims and finally victimize them and how “The Victims” use strategies to cope with menace in order to survive. There are some passages quoted from the plays to facilitate the purpose of the second chapter. The objective in the third chapter is to define “Silences” and “Pauses” as theatrical techniques used in form of non-verbal communication between the characters. I will discuss, based on Peter Hall’s definition, how these techniques are significant in understanding a Pinter play for the readers and the actors who perform them on stage, and will further explore the function of “Silences” and “Pauses” and their distinction in the context of the plays in question in this essay.

Statistical parametric text-to-speech synthesis currently relies on predefined and highly controlled prompts read in a “neutral” voice. This thesis presents work on utilising recordings of free conversation for the purpose of filled pause synthesis and as an inspiration for improved general modelling of speech for text-to-speech synthesis purposes. A corpus of both standard prompts and free conversation is presented and the potential usefulness of conversational speech as the basis for text-to-speech voices is validated. Additionally, through psycholinguistic experimentation it is shown that filled pauses can have potential subconscious benefits to the listener but that current text-to-speech voices cannot replicate these effects. A method for pronunciation variant forced alignment is presented in order to obtain a more accurate automatic speech segmentation something which is particularly bad for spontaneously produced speech. This pronunciation variant alignment is utilised not only to create a more accurate underlying acoustic model, but also as the driving force behind creating more natural pronunciation prediction at synthesis time. While this improves both the standard and spontaneous voices the naturalness of spontaneous speech based voices still lags behind the quality of voices based on standard read prompts. Thus, the synthesis of filled pauses is investigated in relation to specific phonetic modelling of filled pauses and through techniques for the mixing of standard prompts with spontaneous utterances in order to retain the higher quality of standard speech based voices while still utilising the spontaneous speech for filled pause modelling. A method for predicting where to insert filled pauses in the speech stream is also developed and presented, relying on an analysis of human filled pause usage and a mix of language modelling methods. The method achieves an insertion accuracy in close agreement with human usage. The various approaches are evaluated and their improvements documented throughout the thesis, however, at the end the resulting filled pause quality is assessed through a repetition of the psycholinguistic experiments and an evaluation of the compilation of all developed methods.

abstract: This study investigates the success of a method used to encourage active engagement strategies among community and research faculty in a College of Medicine, and examines the effects of these strategies on medical student engagement and exam scores. Ten faculty used suggestions from the Active Engagement Strategies Website (AESW), which explained four strategies that could easily be incorporated into medical education lectures; pause procedure, audience response system, think-pair-share, and muddiest point. Findings from observations conducted during sessions where an active engagement strategy was implemented and when strategies were not implemented, faculty and student surveys, and exam question analysis indicate faculty members found active engagement strategies easy to incorporate, student engagement and exam score means increased when an active engagement strategy was implemented, and students reported perceptions of attaining a higher level of learning, especially when the pause procedure was implemented. Discussion and implications address low cost and easy ways to provide faculty development in medical education that potentially improves the quality of instruction and enhances student outcomes. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Leadership and Innovation 2017

Container-virtualisering har blivit mer och mer använt efter att uppdateringar till cgroups och namespace-funktionerna släpptes i Linuxkärnan. Samtidigt så lider industrins högpresterande beräkningskluster av dyra licenskostnader som skulle kunna hanteras av virtualisering. I den här uppsatsen utformades experiment för att ta reda på om Dockers funktion checkpoint, som fortfarande är under utveckling, skulle kunna utnyttjas i industrins beräkningskluster. Genom att demonstrera detta koncept och dess möjligheter att pausa distribuerade containrar, som kör parallella processer inuti, användes den välkända NAS Parallel Benchmarken (NPB) fördelad över två test-maskiner. Sedan så pausades containrar i olika ordningar och Docker lyckas återuppta benchmarken utan problem både lokalt och distribuerat. Om man försiktigt överväger ordningen som man skriver ner containers till disk (checkpoint) så går det utan problem att återuppta benchmarken lokalt på samma maskin. Slutligen så visar vi även att distribuerade containrar kan återupptas på en annan maskin än där den startade med hög framgång. Dockers prestanda, möjligheter och flexibilitet lämpar sig i framtidens industriella högpresterande kluster där man mycket väl kan köra sina applikationer i containrar istället för att köra dom på det traditionella sättet, direkt på hårdvaran. Genom användning av Docker-containers kan man hantera problemet med dyra licenskostnader och prioriteringar. / Lightweight container virtualization has gained widespread adoption in recent years after updates to namespace and cgroups features in the Linux kernel. At the same time the Industrial High Performance community suffers from expensive licensing costs that could be managed with virtualization. To demonstrate that Docker could be used for suspending distributed containers with parallel processes, experiments were designed to find out if the experimental checkpoint feature is ready for this community. We run the well-known NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) inside containers spread over two systems under test to prove this concept. Then, pausing containers and unpausing them in different sequence orders we were able resume the benchmark. After that, we further demonstrate that if you carefully consider the order in which you Checkpoint/Restore containers, then the checkpoint feature is also able to resume the benchmark successfully. Finally, the concept of restoring distributed containers, running the benchmark, on a different system from where it started was proven to be working with a high success rate. Our tests demonstrate the performance, possibilities and flexibilities of Dockers future in the industrial HPC community. This might very well tip the community over to running their simulations and virtual engineering-applications inside containers instead of running them on native hardware.

This paper is focused on identification of pauses in noisy speech signal and following filtering of the noise from the signal. Firstly the signal processing methods are theoretically described, then voice activity detectors and in the end noise filtering methods are described. Several voice activity detectors were created and their pause detection rate was compared.

Pausing is a natural part of human speech. Pausing is used to segment speech, negotiate meaning, and allow for breathing. In oral speech, pausing, along with other suprasegmental features, plays a critical role in creating meaning as comprehensible speech is seen as a goal for language learners around the world. In order to be comprehensible, language learners need to learn to pause correctly in their speaking. Though this notion is widely accepted by applied linguists and many language teachers, the effect of pausing on intelligibility of spontaneous oral discourse has not been established by empirical data. This study isolates pause duration in spontaneous oral discourse in order to establish its connection to the intelligibility of non-native speech. In this study, North American undergraduate students' reactions to non-native pause duration in spontaneous oral discourse were examined. The task involved measuring the NESs' processing, comprehension, and evaluation of three different versions of an international teaching assistant's presentation: One with unmodified pause duration, one with pause duration shortened by 50%, and a third passage with pause duration lengthened by 50%. Results showed a positive correlation between pause duration and number of listeners able to identify main ideas. Finally, listener reaction was measurably more positive to the unmodified passage than to the passages with lengthened or shortened pauses.

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