A Technique for Determining Time Length of Pause at Final Period of Each Sentence in Story: Design of Synthesized Speech for Supporting Children's Comprehension

摘要

The present study tried to cralify that the storyteller controlled the time length of pause at the final period in each sentence to support children's comprehension and suggest the way in which given findings are applied to reading the text by the use of synthesized speech. During listening to the sound of telling a story text, a listener constructs a mental microworld that is refer to as the term situation model in the discourse psychology. Unlike the storyteller who can read the text at his own pace, however, the listener's construction of the situation model should be influenced by the way in which a storyteller reads the text. Because the event-indexing model indicated that comprehending time of a sentence in a story is progressively longer to the extent that there are continuity breaks on more dimensions (e.g., space, time, characters and objects), we focused on the relationship between the number of mental operations to comprehend a sentence and the time length of pause at the final period in each sentence of the story read by the storyteller. In order to estimate the mental operations that are required to construct the situation model, we devised the multilayered frame representation. Then, we defined a sequence of the operations to transform the case frame representation of each sentence to the multilayered frame representation and examined the relationship between it and the time length of pause at period in the speech sound of a vastly-experienced storyteller. The results indicated that the storyteller controlled the time length of pause according to the number of the operations so as to help the listener to comprehend the story.