Why Do We Pause In Speaking?

While in speaking, a speaker sometimes pauses in a moment. Pause in language is one of the common phenomena that occur in processing language within the brain. Pause may happen as speaker hesitates to speak or stops for breathing. Therefore, from those classifications, the psycholinguists divided the pause into two; silent pause and filled pause. Silent pause is when speaker stops to think of the next utterance he is going to say without any fillers. In addition to silent pause is filled pause. It works the other way around; it fills the silence as speaker stops talking with ‘ah’, ‘oh’, ‘well’, and many others. Furthermore, there are some pause locations where the psycholinguists agree such as grammatical juncture, other constituent boundaries, and before the first content word within a constituent. Moreover, pauses in speaking may become conversational strategy for EFL students to give them more time to plan the utterance they want to execute while trying to avoid the silent interval and nervousness. Here is an article discussing about pause in speaking.

A. Introduction

English language as one of the important languages in communication is the most language learned and studied by people.  This is due to English language is widely used in communication. In addition, many linguists attempt to analyze many phenomena that occur in English language. From this phenomena, many branches of Linguistic study emerged. Among those studies is Psycholinguistic study.

Psycholinguistics is the study of how word meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning are progressing in the mind (O’Grady & Archibald, 2005, p. 435). This study explores what is going on in the human mind when they attempt to acquire, understand, produce and store language (Aitchison, 2003, p. 132). However, in attempting this process, sometimes the speakers need to stop their utterances due to some factors. These factors appear particularly in planning and executing utterance. In accordance with this statement, Maclay and Osgood stated that when people speak spontaneously, they would hem and haw, repeat and correct them, and stutter and stammer (Clark, 1977, p. 260).

This phenomenon is known by linguists as pauses. From those examples, it is inferred, that the speakers need certain amount of time to produce the language, for spontaneous utterance will generally causes pauses. Therefore, in order to investigate this problem, it is necessary to identify the process of how language works in human mind, and factors that cause pauses, and finally the effect of pauses in English language learning.

 B.     Language and Human Mind

Human brain is not only able to gain and store the mental grammar, but also it is able to access that linguistic store to speak and comprehend the spoken language (Aitchison, 2003, p. 132). In addition, when planning and executing language, human brain works in a very complex way to enable the speaker produces some utterances. Several stages are conducted before producing language such as: message stage where the intended message expressed is formulated, then functional stage where the lexicon is chosen suitably with the expressed message; grammatical information for each lexicon, afterward, positional stage. This is a step where the lexicon is arranged in hieratical order and not linier order. Finally, the phonological encoding where the positional process is done, it is sent to phonological stage to be realized in sound (Dardjowidjodjo, 2003, p. 119).

Though as one speaks seemingly requires a little effort, the brain in fact, has worked in extremely fast way to produce the intended message. From the figure above, it is known that brain has gone through complex way in order to produce language. Therefore, in producing language particularly when one speaks, he has indirectly sent the message to the brain so that it can choose the constituent that corresponds the message; it was carried on to functional process up to the phonological encoding. 

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C.     Pauses in Speaking

Speaking is an instrumental act. As speaker talks, he expect to put some effects to the interlocutor either to get response or to get things done (Clark, 1977, p. 223). Therefore, as one speaks but doesn’t have effect on the listener or hearer, the communication is not effectively accomplished. H. Clark proposed four factors underlying effective communication; common knowledge, personnel, joint action, and contribution (Dardjowidjodjo, 2003, p. 121). However, though these four factors are achieved, sometimes speakers need to think of what they are going to say. Consequently, the speech doesn’t always go smoothly as the speakers have to do both thinking and speaking at the same time. This creates pauses in their speech.

Normally, people need time to think what they are going to talk so that they need a plan before executing the speech. The interval between planning and executing is named pauses. As Levelt said planning utterance involves selecting the material the speaker wishes to share by carefully choosing the topic that is appropriate  and clear for the listener so that it will have effect on him; attracting his attention (Kirsten Malmkjaer and James M. Anderson, 1995, p. 363).

In planning the speech, speaker will generally select his words constituent by constituent so that in execution process, he needs to produce the planned constituent as fluently as possible (Clark, 1977, p. 260). Surprisingly, the execution doesn’t always work as planned because speaker’s mind hasn’t completely planned the constituent but it is already executed (Clark, 1977, p. 260). To solve this problem, they need to stop and re-plan their speech.

Generally pause happened because the speaker is hesitant to produce the speech. When they are hesitant, they would be really cautious with the speech they are going to produce. Accordingly, this situation made them stop to think a while to plan carefully their speech. On the other situation, pause happened because the speaker needs to breathe. From these two situations, two types of pauses emerged; silent pause and filled pause.

Silent pause is a period of no speech between words and filled pause is an interval filled with fillers such as ah, oh, well, say and many others (Clark, 1977, p. 262). In addition, those fillers have meaning in pauses. Soenjono Dardjowidjojo has explicitly elaborated those filler meanings (Dardjowidjodjo, 2003, p. 145).

However, as English language becomes media of communication that has been widely used internationally, the other fillers occur. Indonesian speakers for instance, when they speak English, they have their own feature of filler such as; actually, let’s say, hmmm, and many others. These fillers are uttered to fill in the gap while they were thinking another utterance.

Moreover, Maclay and Osgood (1959) argued that the most conspicuous feature of silent pauses are that speaker has tendency to stop prior to content word of constituent before the first adjective or noun (Clark, 1977, p. 266). Though some experts are still arguing over this location of pauses, they agreed that there are places where pauses might happen; grammatical juncture, between one constituent and another, and before a major syntactic category (Dardjowidjodjo, 2003, p. 146).

Grammatical juncture is a logical place to stop and plan another utterance. This location of pause happened frequently as it means to take a breath after speaking (Dardjowidjodjo, 2003, p. 146). Furthermore, average pause interval at grammatical juncture is 1.03 seconds (Clark, 1977, p. 267). Next is a pause between one constituent and another is a pause within sentences. This location of pause is an appropriate place to pause, for the speaker will plan a more detail step of what he is going to speak precisely. Finally, pause before major syntactic category. This is a pause where the speaker has planned the constituent, yet before it is completed, he imperfectly executed it (Clark, 1977, p. 268). For instance, when the speaker has uttered the word ‘the’ before the plan is completed, the speaker will stop after the article ‘the’ and think of the follow up word after ‘the’; the incredible.

D.     Pauses and their Implication on English Language Learning

Pause in foreign language teaching is proven to be useful for EFL students, especially when the students are speaking English language. The fact that happened on the field is not all English language teachers are aware of the importance. Further, teaching speaking is not a matter of teaching them how to speak by exposing them to English language conversation.

In EFL learning, Scott Thornbury suggested the speaking genre. There are two different genre of speaking: transactional and interpersonal function (Harmer, 2007, p. 343). In addition, transactional function has its main purpose conveying information and interpersonal function is focusing on maintaining and good relation with people (Harmer, 2007, p. 343).

For EFL students, it is sometimes difficult to convey the information they want. As a result, there is a silent interval as they communicate with other speakers. In addition, it will lead to ineffective communication for one student may dominate more than others.

Providing the students with conversational strategy is one of the ways overcoming the problem. Pauses in Psycholinguistic will help students producing the speech while they were thinking and also will help them to avoid nervousness.

E. Conclusion

Pause in language is one of the common phenomena that occur in processing language within the brain. Pause may happen as speaker hesitates to speak or stops for breathing. Therefore, from those classifications, the psycholinguists divided the pause into two; silent pause and filled pause.

Silent pause is when speaker stops to think of the next utterance he is going to say without any fillers. In addition to silent pause is filled pause. It works the other way around; it fills the silence as speaker stops talking with ‘ah’, ‘oh’, ‘well’, and many others.

Furthermore, there are some pause locations where the psychologists agree such as grammatical juncture, other constituent boundaries, and before the first content word within a constituent. Moreover, pauses in speaking may become conversational strategy for EFL students to give them more time to plan the utterance they want to execute while trying to avoid the silent interval and nervousness.

References

Aitchison, Jean. (2003). Teach yourself Linguistics. London: Hodder& Stoughton Ltd. .

Clark, H. Herbert, and Eve V. Clark. (1977). Pyschology and Language. United States of America: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Dardjowidjodjo, Soenjono. (2003). Psikolinguistik: Pengantar Pemahaman Bahasa Manusia. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia.

Harmer, Jeremy. (2007). The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th ed.). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.

Kirsten Malmkjaer and James M. Anderson. (Eds). (1995). The Linguistics Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge.

O’Grady, W., and John Archibald. (Eds.). (2005). Contemporary Linguistics (5th ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.