| Summary: | Variability in speech features of Parkinsonians has been described in studies on Parkinsonism. The purpose of this study was to investigate some factories involved in this variability, specifically in pause duration. Speech simples containing pauses were extracted from spontaneous conversations of two male Brazilian Parkinsonians. Four hundred twenty four pauses (subject one = 130; subject two = 294) were collected, measured and classified according to: (1) degree of duration (very short, short, middle, long and very long); (2) position at the beginning (initial) or in the development (internal) of the subject’s conversational turn; and (3) presence of silence only (unfilled), sound (filled) and combinations between silence and sound (mixed). Great variability in pause duration occurred in both inter and intrasubjects. Except for internal middle pauses, subject one had shorter mean values in pause duration. Filled pauses had shorter mean duration for the two subjects when compared to unfilled ones; however, mixed pauses had longer values for subjects two than subject one. Factors such as cognitive organization, affective states, articulatory difficulties, semantic aspects of enunciation and conversational strategies were linked to the variability in pause duration presented by the 2 subjects.
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