A Study Of The Pause Placement In Chinese EFL Learners’ Read Speech

Pause is a necessary part of colloquial English and reflects the internal activities of the speaker in the speech planning process. Wrong or inappropriate pause will cause the semantic ambiguity of speech production, which interferes with listeners’ comprehension and directly affect oral communication. Meanwhile, pause behavior is known to be a multidimensional and multilayered complex system, where the placement of pause is the result of interaction of different factors on different levels. In the study of the features of pause placement in Chinese EFL learner’s read speech, most focus on the effect of syntactic structure on the pause placement. Furthermore, there are also few studies aimed at the mutual effects of syntactic structure and speaking variability on the pause placement.Through contrasting the regulations of the pause placement in native speakers’ read speech, this study investigates the features in the pause placement in Chinese EFL learners’ read speech from syntactic structure, prosodic structure and communicative function.The subjects in the present study are 25 Chinese EFL learners, including 20 females and 5 males on postgraduate level with English majors. The study investigates the features of each pause performed or missed by subjects sentence by sentence from the syntactic structure, the prosodic structure and communicative function, with the application of the computer software Adobe Audition, Praat, Microsoft Word and Excel, both silent juncture pauses and hesitation pauses are detected and analyzed. Through a comprehensive analysis of the results, the major findings are concluded as follows:1) The percentage of appropriate pauses performed by subjects is much higher than wrong pauses(including inappropriate pauses and missing pauses).2) Subjects perform higher rate of appropriate pauses at sentence boundaries and clause boundaries. The wrong pauses are mainly correlated to relative clauses. Subjects usually perform pauses after the introducers or fail to make pauses before the introducers.3) As to subjects’ pauses performance in connection to phrases, there is a higher rate of wrong pauses than the percentage of appropriate pauses. Moreover, most part of inappropriate pauses and missing pauses occur in NP. Also, subjects make nearly equal appropriate pauses and wrong pauses relevant to Adv.P. And a few subjects perform wrong pauses within VP, Adj.P and PP.4) Subjects make much more wrong pauses related to words than appropriate pauses in connection to words. Moreover, the most percentage of wrong pauses is in connection to adverbs. Subjects not only make inappropriate pauses between adverbs and their modified words but also fail to insert appropriate IP breaks after the sentence adverbials.5) Silent juncture pauses co-occur with other hesitation phenomena i.e. Self-correction, repetition and reformulation in Chinese EFL learners’ read speech.6) There are correspondences and deviations of the pause placement in Chinese EFL learners’ read speech examined from the integration of three factors. Regarding the correspondences, firstly, the prosodic pauses(IP boundaries) performed by subjects were highly coincided with syntactic boundaries. Secondly, the distributions of wrong pauses examined from the communicative function correspond to those pausing performance examined from prosodic structure.As to the deviations, on one hand, subjects seem to perform too much inappropriate pauses in connection to final reporting pauses, which shows that prosodic boundary is not always identical with syntactic boundary. It is essential to investigate each pause in the light of the communicate function. On the other hand, subjects perform more missing pauses than inappropriate pauses both from syntactic structure and prosodic structure. On the contrary, the percentage of inappropriate pauses is slightly higher than that of missing pauses under the effect of communicative function. All of these deviations further verify that speech production never exists unless the real communicative context.Theoretically, the results of present study have further verified that the pause placement is the result of interaction of different factors. Furthermore, the results of study of silent juncture pauses and hesitation phenomena indicate difficulties in language planning and execution in learners’ read speech, which encourages further research on the relationship between learners’ psycholinguistic process and their speech production.Pedagogically, this study provides teachers with a general picture of learners’ pause placement in read speech and inspires them to emphasize teaching suprasegmental features in English. Meanwhile, it also encourages learners to raise awareness of pauses in oral production.