The Dance of Pauses in Poetry Declamation

In poetry declamation, the appropriate use of prosody to cause pleasure is essential. Among the prosodic parameters, pause is one of the most effective to engage the listeners and provide them with a pleasant experience. The declamation of three poems in two varieties of Portuguese by ten Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers and ten European Portuguese (EP) speakers, balanced for gender, was used as a corpus for evaluating the degree of pleasantness by listeners from the same language variety. The distributions of pause duration and inter-pause interval (IPI) both varied greatly across the subjects, being the main source of variability and strongly right-tailed. The evaluation of the degree of pleasantness revealed that pause duration predicts degree of pleasantness in EP, whereas IPI predicts degree of pleasantness in BP. Reciters perform a kind of complex “dance”, where sonority between pauses is favored in BP and pause duration in EP.