Speakup Pausing for Punctuation?

[Chime Hart]

HI All: Well, all-of-a-sudden on Saturday afternoon I was noticing odd pauses 
while reading mail, which I first thought were cpu or bandwidth related. After 
examining text, it looks like Speakup is pausing where a punctuation is. I 
normally keep both punc settings on 0 but if I move reading punc to 3  it reads 
a dot when it finds a period. So these pauses are a kind of quiet while it would 
be saying a punctuation item. Is this some  sort of option in Speakup, where I 
can switch among words or sentences? I don't think this is DecTalk driven. 
Thanks so much in advance for any suggestions.
Chime