Hierarchical timing structure of utterance in human dialogue

In this research, to clarify the relation between a cognitive process and a timing structure of utterance, the dialogue that consisted of an instruction and a response utterance was analyzed. The results showed that correlation between duration of instruction utterance and that of switching pause was negative and low value, when a change of utterance speed was too small to be aware. However, the correlation between them was positive and high value, when a change of utterance speed was explicitly big. The positive correlation between durations has been reported in some researches, however the negative and low correlation between them have not been reported. These results suggest that there is hierarchical timing structure in human dialog.