Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine more deeply the relationship between pause location and duration and its connection to clause and phrase boundaries for native English speakers (NESs). Previous research has shown pauses produced by NESs to be located at clause boundaries (Brown & Miron, 1971; Hawkins, 1971; Tavakoli, 2011), but little empirical work has been done to probe this issue further. For this research, 80 speech samples, 40 male and 40 female, were randomly selected from the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) representing different regions in the United States. Oral data from the read-aloud portion of the samples were used for this research. The grammatical structures within the speech sample were tagged, and the filled and unfilled pauses were marked for location and duration. The utterances were analyzed for pauses occurring at grammatical boundaries and punctuation marks. The results showed that 91.5% of all pauses in the speech samples were found after clauses, phrases, or punctuation marks, leaving only 8.5% to occur within these structures. The number of pauses per boundary out of the potential pauses at those boundaries was also analyzed. The findings from this study indicate that NESs pause after 94.2% of the available periods, 69.4% of the clauses, 44.7% of the commas, and 5.7% of the phrases. In addition to these findings on pause location, pauses were found to be longest at clause and period boundaries with average pause lengths of 652 ms and 734 ms respectively and shortest at phrase and comma boundaries with average pause lengths of 471 ms and 511 ms respectively. The results also showed that these differences were statistically significant between clauses and phrases as well as periods and commas. Although filled pauses were marked, no meaningful findings can be reported due to there only being a total of 10 filled pauses in all 80 speech samples. Gender differences were also statistically significant when measuring pause duration with the average pause length of males being 659 ms and those of females being 550 ms. In addition to providing new empirical evidence describing NESs' use of pausing, these findings have potential implications to help non-native English speakers (NNESs) improve their use of pausing in English as a means of enhancing their fluency and intelligibility.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Linguistics

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