The Syntactic Location of Hesitation Pauses

Abstract

Spontaneous narrative speech was obtained from 48 children by asking them to make up a story. A grammatical analysis of the hesitation pauses was carried out. Two-thirds of all the pauses, and three-quarters of the pause-time, was found to occur at boundaries between clauses. Pauses occasioned by lexical items occurred more frequently at a group boundary than within the group. It is suggested that the high frequency of clause-boundary pausing is a function of (a) the speech situation and (b) the range of options confronting the speaker at the beginning of a clause.