Pauses and punctuation marks in Brazilian Portuguese read speech

In this paper we assess pause effects corresponding to comma, semicolon, colon and the ones that are not related to any punctuation marks, all of them within sentences. Thus, through the analysis of a corpus of approximately 17 hours of recording, carried out by a female professional speaker (native) of the Brazilian Portuguese language, we observe a large proportion of pauses without punctuation (61.3%). Besides, our data reinforce the presence of topic-comment structures in reading. The results here presented with respect to pause and punctuation are consistent with several studies about this theme.