Pause in Persian

Speech has both segmental and suprasegmental features. Suprasegmental features are more important in speech since without them speech becomes mechanical and machine-like. Suprasegmental features include stress, intonation, juncture, pause and the like. Among these phenomena, pause is the one that has received less attention because most people equate it with juncture and use the two terms interchangeably. The present research was designed to examine the acoustic correlate, position and frequency of pause in terms of sociolinguistics variables. Data were collected from formal and informal speech styles and analyzed with the help of Praat software.