Forms And Functions Of Silent Pauses In Uyghur Across Different Tempos

This paper regards one specific element within the framework of a larger research project whose purpose is to clarify the differences and similarities in prosodic deficits between Chinese and Uyghur aphasic languages. The goal of the present paper is to carry out production experiments of silent pauses in Uyghur. Considerable attentions are given to the changes in occurrences and duration of silent pauses across three tempos (normal, slow and fast) of Uyghur language. Another special focus is put on how to change tempos (speaking rates) by silent pausing features. In order to achieve that, thirty-one subjects (one Uyghur professional announcer and thirty Uyghur students from Xinjiang Normal University) read one Uyghur text in Uyghur, using three self selected speaking rates in a cycle of normal, slow and fast.The present paper intends to investigate following questions: 1. What are forms of silent pauses in Uyghur prosody? 2. What are functions of silent pauses in Uyghur prosody? 3. What silent pausing strategies are employed by Uyghur speakers to decrease or increase their speaking rates?The results of production tasks on Uyghur indicates that both the occurrences and duration of silent pauses are increasing with the upgrading of prosodic boundaries regardless of changes in tempos; the mean duration of silent pauses vary from 292 ms to 395 ms; the distribution of silent pause duration is skewed to the left and follows a log-normal distribution. Most silent pauses in reading are grammatical ones which carry a status of prosodic boundary. When there is a change in tempo, Uyghur speakers tend to vary both the occurrences and duration of silent pauses, especially those of boundary pauses, to support that change. Compared with normal tempo, in slower tempo, the occurrences and duration of silent pauses tend to increase while in faster tempo, the occurrences and duration of silent pauses tend to decrease. In addition, Uyghur normal speaking rate is 4.8 syllables per second; Uyghur slow speaking rate is 3.7 syllables per second; Uyghur fast speaking rate is 5.9 syllables per second.The present paper provides the researches on silent pause with more confident data, further develops the researches on Uyghur prosody, and is expected to help the study of speech synthesis and speech recognition in Uyghur.