Pause for Thought: A Pilot Comparative Study of Pause Placement Amongst Native, Heritage, and Non-Native Speakers

Temporal features and frequency of pauses have been studied extensively in the literature, but the interest in the syntactic location of pauses is a more recent development. While previous research has studied the pause patterns of L1 and L2 speakers as well as the effects of pause location on perceptions of fluency, these studies have all utilized a binary approach the categorization of pauses as occurring either between or within clauses or major constituent boundaries. This research attempts to take a look at pause placement with a finer distinction of pause location, including junctures that occur between and within phrases. To accomplish this, two experiments were conducted. The first experiment gathered read-aloud speech samples from native, non-native, and heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese, which were then manipulated in Praat to contain only a single pause that occurred either between or within phrases. The samples were presented to native Chinese speakers to assess for perceptions of fluency as affected by the pause location condition. Findings of this preliminary pilot study did not find a significant correlation between pause location and perceptions of fluency at the phrasal level. The second experiment gathered spontaneous speech samples from the same speaker population as Experiment 1. The pauses that occurred in the samples were coded according to a system developed by the author to account for eight different syntactic junctions, and the percentage of pause at each location was calculated. Analysis showed a significant correlation with pause location and percentage of pauses (p < 0.01), as well as a statistically significant interaction between the effects of speaker status and pause location on percentage of pause (p = 0.011). The findings of this study are limited due to the small population size, but research in this fine-grained analysis of pause location within a clause has implications in the fields of L2 acquisition, psycholinguistics, and natural language processing.