PAUSING
The length and frequency of pausing in speech varies greatly from speaker to speaker and from situation to situation. A distinction is made between a speaker’s speaking rate (in syllables per second), which includes pauses, and their articulation rate, which does not. Comparisons between the two show that much of the difference between what is perceived as ‘normal’ speech and ‘fast’ speech is due not to faster articulation but to reduced pausing.
There are a number of positions in which pauses potentially occur; they include: the end of an intonational phrase, the end of a syntactic constituent and immediately after a major content word. Systematic pausing of this kind performs several functions:
marking syntactic boundaries;
allowing the speaker time to forward plan;
providing semantic focus (a pause after an important word);
marking a word or phrase rhetorically (a pause before it);
indicating the speaker’s willingness to hand over the speech turn to an interlocutor.
The first two are closely connected. For the speaker, it is efficient to construct forward planning around syntactic or phonological units (the two may not always coincide). For the listener, this carries the benefit that syntactic boundaries are often marked.
Planning is vital to the speech process and pausing is necessary in order to remove what is in the speech buffer (i.e. the words we are currently producing) and to replace it with a new chunk of speech for the next part of the utterance. When experimenters have forced speakers to suppress pausing, it has resulted in confused and sometimes incoherent discourse.
It is useful to distinguish pausing as described above from hesitation. Whereas a juncture pause occurs at the end of a syntactic or phonological unit, a hesitation pause will often occur within such a unit, reflecting inadequate forward planning or difficulty in retrieving a lexical item from the lexicon. Rather confusingly, the term filled pause is used for a particular type of hesitation, where the speaker inserts fillers such as ‘you know’, ‘er’, ‘well’.
Hesitation pauses may be part of a speaker’s speech style. They may reflect the state of mind of the speaker, who might be tired or ill or not concentrating very well. They may reflect the speaker’s problems of lexical access when a target word is infrequent or complex in form or when a speech event such as a lecture demands precise terminology. Evidence suggests that listeners discriminate between the two types of pause: they pay heed to juncture pauses but accord a low level of attention to hesitation pauses.
See also: Fluency, Planning, Prosody
Further reading: Laver (1994: Chap. 17)
