5 ms·

>because Japanese people pause between spoken words just like anyone else. This is (surprisingly) not true. People do not pause between words, however when lis

>because Japanese people pause between spoken words just like anyone else. This is (surprisingly) not true. People do not pause between words, however when listening to a language that they understand, they do perceive pauses between words; even though such pauses do not exist.

yomly 9y ago
I disagree. There's a subtle difference between breathing cadence and inflection, and a completely monotempo monotonal string of sounds.
- snakeboy 9y ago
  It seems like it'd be useful for one or both of you to cite any research than has been done on this. Seems more productive (and enlightening to all) than the agree/disagree dialogue here.
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    Unfourtuantly, this is so well established that it is hard to find research. I did find this paper [1] which looks into how babies acuire word boundries. As you identify, there are probably phonetic cues; but not pauses. The best way to see this is to try listening to a language you do not understand, and try to identify word boundries. Indeed, the paper I link argues that some phonetic cue must exist because babies can recognise word boundries. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8176060 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8176060
    - gizmo686 9y ago
      It seems I linked only to the abstract. Here [1] is the pdf. [1] https://www.sissa.it/cns/Articles/94_doInfPerceiveWordB.pdf https://www.sissa.it/cns/Articles/94_doInfPerceiveWordB.pdf
  - yomly 9y ago
    Well for starters, a Japanese speaker can tell the differences between God "kami" and paper "kami"... A monotonal, monotempo sound would not be able to make that difference audible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rcthompson 9y ago
  I think the claim being made is that the pause between consecutive syllables is (on average) the same whether they're part of the same word or not, so inter-syllable time is not a reliable indicator of word boundaries. Anecdotally, I think this is probably true of my speech most of the time (i.e. any time I'm not consciously enunciating). It might be less true for people with accents that have a slower cadence.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
derefr 9y ago
Wow, there are a lot of responses putting a lot of weight in my exact choice of words, here. I'm not a linguist; I don't know what the proper name is for the thing people do between each pair of spoken words—that they don't do inside words—but I do know that there is something people do there. I would call it "a pause" because that is the function it serves. It's an overlap of lesser "terminal" sounds that forms something that is detectably a semantic gap—like the pause between crossfaded tracks on a gapless record, or between movements in a concerto. Whatever it is, it is there, because speech-recognition systems use it to detect spoken word boundaries regardless of language. (This heuristic does screw up sometimes; spoken language does often "slur" particular word-pairs together. But it's rare enough that these can be trained as specific exceptions to the rule, rather than needing to throw out the rule.)

yomly 9y ago

I disagree. There's a subtle difference between breathing cadence and inflection, and a completely monotempo monotonal string of sounds.

snakeboy 9y ago
It seems like it'd be useful for one or both of you to cite any research than has been done on this. Seems more productive (and enlightening to all) than the agree/disagree dialogue here.
- gizmo686 9y ago
  Unfourtuantly, this is so well established that it is hard to find research. I did find this paper [1] which looks into how babies acuire word boundries. As you identify, there are probably phonetic cues; but not pauses. The best way to see this is to try listening to a language you do not understand, and try to identify word boundries. Indeed, the paper I link argues that some phonetic cue must exist because babies can recognise word boundries. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8176060 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8176060
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    It seems I linked only to the abstract. Here [1] is the pdf. [1] https://www.sissa.it/cns/Articles/94_doInfPerceiveWordB.pdf https://www.sissa.it/cns/Articles/94_doInfPerceiveWordB.pdf
- yomly 9y ago
  Well for starters, a Japanese speaker can tell the differences between God "kami" and paper "kami"... A monotonal, monotempo sound would not be able to make that difference audible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rcthompson 9y ago
I think the claim being made is that the pause between consecutive syllables is (on average) the same whether they're part of the same word or not, so inter-syllable time is not a reliable indicator of word boundaries. Anecdotally, I think this is probably true of my speech most of the time (i.e. any time I'm not consciously enunciating). It might be less true for people with accents that have a slower cadence.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

derefr 9y ago

Wow, there are a lot of responses putting a lot of weight in my exact choice of words, here. I'm not a linguist; I don't know what the proper name is for the thing people do between each pair of spoken words—that they don't do inside words—but I do know that there is something people do there. I would call it "a pause" because that is the function it serves. It's an overlap of lesser "terminal" sounds that forms something that is detectably a semantic gap—like the pause between crossfaded tracks on a gapless record, or between movements in a concerto. Whatever it is, it is there, because speech-recognition systems use it to detect spoken word boundaries regardless of language. (This heuristic does screw up sometimes; spoken language does often "slur" particular word-pairs together. But it's rare enough that these can be trained as specific exceptions to the rule, rather than needing to throw out the rule.)