Read Out Loud Problem - Long Pauses in Table of Content (TOC)

I have a long document with a TOC on the third page. Read Out Loud starts to read the document just fine. But a few lines into the TOC, there is a very long pause (45-60 seconds) between the reading of the and the . This happens only for some of the listings in the TOC. I compared all the tags in the Content Panel and the Tags Panel, and see no difference between the TOC lines which pause and those which do not.
 
I have cleared the page structure, deleted the links, archived the , archived any trash on the page, and generally started from scratch. Still, the TOC reads with these huge pauses.
 
This work is for a client and I have no idea what the authoring program is.
 
Any ideas?