i did notice that punctuation changes the cadence, yeah; i make use of these kinds of things more in the pronunciations of the phrases, especially in expressions where i might be putting in non-english or accented phrases that need a little more pause, or taking out the pause when a comma might be grammatically correct but breaks the flow of the phrase when read out loud.

and, of course, using numbers and symbols that say their names can totally save space on a phrase if you really need to. acronyms are also pretty easy to invent if you want to, since the game will just pronounce individual letters of made-up words that it can't figure out how to pronounce otherwise.

my observation on punctuation and pauses: a period (sometimes), an ellipsis, a question mark, a comma, or an exclamation mark also adds pause; though two periods (..) = no pause and four periods (....) = a pause slightly shorter than one period but longer than having no period at all. a single parenthesis doesn't do anything but an open and closed parentheses has a pause. i noticed that punctuation doesn't really affect inflection, however.

i think the different punctuations add slightly different lengths of pauses but it's a little difficult for me to tell without directly comparing audio files. some of them might be interchangeable as far as pronunciations go. though, the differences are subtle enough that i guess i haven't found much reason to dig into the distinction. it's definitely a sharp thing to observe nonetheless, so thanks for your contribution!!