The Duration Of Pauses In Non-Spontaneous Lithuanian Speech

Abstract

Pauses in Lithuanian speech have not been researched extensively. The aim of this researchis to determine tendencies to pause as well as the duration of pauses in non-spontaneousLithuanian speech. The research material consists of 12 professional actors‘ speech recordings(the same text was read three times by each actor; the length of the text is 167 words).In non-spontaneous speech, pauses between paragraphs and sentences are produced everytime, while inside a sentence they are facultative and almost inevitable between syntagmas,which are formed from closely grammatically related word combinations.The longest pauses usually emerge between paragraphs. In most cases pauses betweensentences are shorter (on an average 0.7 times) than between paragraphs. The length ofpauses inside sentences varies the most; the average of their length is nearly two timesshorter than the average of pauses between sentences. A rather facultative formation ofthese pauses and a great variability of their length allows drawing a conclusion, that a writtentext is phrased and its suggestibility is created not only by pauses.Pauses always occur where visual and grammatical-semantic separation is very clear (paragraphs,boundaries of a sentence, components of a composite sentence). In other cases theoccurrence of pauses and their length are facultative, dependent on a reader‘s intentions andperhaps innate features and skills.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.31.18653