Influence of Pauses on Evaluations by Native Japanese Speakers of Speeches by Korean Students of Japanese

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine negative phonetic grades assigned to speeches by Korean students of Japanese. In particular, the study focused on auditory and acoustic-phonetic characteristics in terms of how they are affected by a pause, and whether such characteristics were used for evaluation by native Japanese speakers. For speeches that received negative evaluations, we edited the length of pauses thought to have affected the speech evaluation so that they were the same length as those made by a native Japanese speaker in order to determine whether the edited data would increase the evaluation grade.

Higher marks were achieved when pauses were positioned after sentences, conjunctive particles, the topic marker “wa,” and adnominal modifiers. These results indicate that adjusting pause length may increase speech quality as evaluated by native Japanese speakers.