In this study we investigated how pause length and pause ratio influence listeners in ascribing emotional states to the speaker, if nothing but the length of the pauses changes. We did this by taking emotionally neutral speech samples and manipulating the length of pauses. Our results show that the same speech samples were perceived to be happier, more positive, more heated, and concurrently less sad, less disgusted and less scared when pauses were shorter.
Index Terms. emotion, speech, pause ratio