micropauses

Micropauses are very brief pauses within spoken language, typically silent intervals between words or syllables that last a fraction of a second to a few hundred milliseconds. They are shorter than ordinary conversational pauses and are distinct from filled pauses such as um or uh.

Micropauses occur at points of lexical planning, syntactic planning, or prosodic shaping, and they can help organize speech into chunks without breaking fluency. They may reflect processing load, speech rate, or the speaker’s rhythm and can be produced as short silences or as moments of very low amplitude in the voice. In connected speech, micropauses often occur at phrase boundaries or before important lexical items, aiding anticipation and disambiguation for the listener.

In research and practice, micropauses are identified through acoustic analysis of audio data, using measures of silence duration, voice activity, and timing relative to surrounding segments. They vary across languages, dialects, individual speakers, and speaking tasks; spontaneous conversation tends to show more variability than read or rehearsed speech. Factors influencing micropauses include word frequency, syntactic complexity, and the speaker’s fluency or cognitive load.

Applications of micropauses include fluency assessment in language learning and clinical contexts, modeling prosody in speech synthesis and recognition, and the study of discourse structure in linguistics. While they are a natural part of speech, the frequency and length of micropauses differ widely between speakers and situations, underscoring their role as a flexible tool for real-time language planning and delivery.