iTunes skips ahead skip ahead when continuing playback after pausing

Just recently (after an iTunes upgrade? -- I'm running iTunes 11.1.3 with OS X 10.9), I noticed that when I pause a playback in iTunes and then hit play to resume, the playback "skips a beat" - it doesn't pick up where it left off, but rather a fraction of a second (or more) later in the audio track. This may not matter too much for music, but for audio books or instructional materials, useful information is skipped over and it's a nuisance to back up to find it and play it.

Any ideas what may be causing this or, better yet, how to fix it?

Thanks.