The successive speech and silence durations in selected passages of spontaneous speech were found to have a regular structure. Relatively long pauses tended to occur with short utterances and these periods alternated with periods in which relatively short pauses and long utterances occurred together. Other hesitation phenomena appear to be associated more with the periods characterised by the longer pauses than with the periods characterised by long utterances. A relationship was demonstrated in terms of temporal features such that a hesitant period and the following fluent period together might be hypothesised to be a unit.
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