Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-ktprf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-05T15:34:36.281Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A comparative analysis of pausing in child and adult storytelling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2012

MELISSA A. REDFORD
MELISSA A. REDFORD*
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Melissa Redford, Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1290. E-mail: redford@uoregon.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The goals of the current study were (a) to assess differences in child and adult pausing and (b) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from 10 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of pause frequency, duration, variation in durations, and pause location indicated that pause time decreased with retelling, but not with age group except when child and adult pausing was considered in its speech and language context. The results suggest that differences in child and adult pausing reflect differences in child and adult language, not in the cognitive resources allocated to language production.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , May 2013 , pp. 569 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Butterworth, B., & Goldman-Eisler, F. (1979). Recent studies in cognitive rhythm. In Siegman, A. & Feldstein, S. (Eds.), Of speech and time: Temporal speech patterns in interpersonal contexts (pp. 211–224). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Cooper, W., & Paccia-Cooper, J. (1980). Syntax and speech. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esposito, A. (2005). Children's organization of discourse structure through pausing means. In Faundez-Zanuy, M., Janer, L., Esposito, A., Satue-Villar, A., Roure, J., & Espinosa-Duro, V. (Eds.), Nonlinear analyses and algorithms for speech processing. Lecture notes in computer science (Vol. 3817, pp. 108–115). Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Esposito, A., Stejskal, V., Smékal, Z., & Bourbakis, N. (2007). The significance of empty speech pauses: Cognitive and algorithmic issues. In Mele, F., Ramella, G., Santillo, S., & Ventriglia, F. (Eds.), Advances in brain, vision, and artificial intelligence. Lecture notes in computer science (Vol. 4729, pp. 542–554). Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Ferreira, F. (1991). Effects of length and syntactic complexity on initiation times for prepared utterances. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 210–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, F. (1993). Creation of prosody during sentence production. Psychological Review, 2, 233–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, B. (1999). What are discourse markers. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 931–952.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gee, J. P., & Grosjean, F. (1984). Empirical evidence for narrative structure. Cognitive Science, 8, 59–85.Google Scholar
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1961). A comparative study of two hesitation phenomena. Language and Speech, 4, 18–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968). Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Grosjean, F., Grosjean, L., & Lane, H. (1979). The patterns of silence: Performance structures in sentence production. Cognitive Psychology, 11, 58–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henderson, A., Goldman-Eisler, F., & Skarbek, A. (1966). Sequential temporal patterns in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 9, 207–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kent, R., & Forner, L. (1980). Speech segment durations in sentence recitations by children and adults. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 8, 157–168.Google Scholar
Krivokapic, J. (2007). Prosodic planning: Effects of phrasal length and complexity on pause duration. Journal of Phonetics, 35, 162–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDaniel, D., McKee, C., & Garrett, M. F. (2010). Children's sentence planning: Syntactic correlates of fluency variations. Journal of Child Language, 37, 59–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sabin, E., Clemmer, E., O'Connell, D., & Kowal, S. (1979). A pausological approach to speech development. In Siegman, A. & Feldstein, S. (Eds.), Of speech and time: Temporal speech patterns in interpersonal contexts (pp. 35–55). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Selkirk, E. (1984). Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Smith, B. (1992). Relationships between duration and temporal variability in children's and adults’ speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 91, 2165–2174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zvonik, E., & Cummins, F. (2002). Pause duration and variability in read texts. Paper presented at the 2002 International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP ’02), Denver, CO.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zvonik, E., & Cummins, F. (2003). The effect of surround phrase lengths on pause duration. Paper presented at Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, Switzerland.Google Scholar