Abstract
Some pauses are found in natural reading a book aloud, which work to support smooth communication. They are supposed to be working in transliterating service for visually impaired people. In this study, we propose types and functions of the pauses in that situation. We conducted an experiment to record speeches of 3 transliterators. As a result, 2 types of pauses were extracted; pause as visual information, and pause as easy-to-understand. In the both type usage, an expert made better use of the short pauses which put 0.5 second or less in the speeches than other transliterators. This suggests that the short pauses have an important function to support the smooth communication. In the future work, we analyze pitches and other parameters to specify the characteristics of expression with the short pauses.
