Temporal Aspects of Reading Aloud and Speaking: Three Experiments

Abstract

Three different experiments on the effects of linguistic development or proficiency on temporal aspects of reading aloud and speaking assessed the frequency, length, and location of unfilled pauses, speech rate, and phrase length. In general, proficiency decreased the frequency and length of those pauses and increased speech rate and phrase length when the subjects were reading, whereas it only increased speech rate and phrase length, and produced a sensitivity to semantic variations, when they were retelling a story. These findings, the exceptions to them, and the effect of the specific location of the pauses on their length suggest a pretheoretical distinction between the pauses' linguistic and cognitive functions. The present research had its origin in the conviction that an approach to oral reading and speech production through their temporal properties can yield lawful psycholinguistic results. Generically, the research tradition can be traced back to Maclay and Osgood (1959), particularly with regard to their specification of unfilled pauses, filled pauses, repeats, and false starts as relevant categories of speech behavior, and to GoldmanEisler (1968), for the basic hypothesis that temporal aspects of speech behavior can serve as indicants of underlying cognitive processes. In previous research, O'Connell, Kowal, and Hormann (1969) and O'Connell and Kowal (1972) emphasized the semantic determinants of unfilled pauses in the reading and retelling of short narrative paragraphs. For groups of American and German adolescents and adults tested in their native languages, an unusual turn of events in a paragraph was found literally to give people pause. The unusual version consistently yielded more frequent and longer unfilled pauses, and thus supported the hypothesis of the cognitive function of such pauses. Nonetheless, as both Boomer (1970) and Fillenbaum (1971) have pointed out, the research remains largely atheoretical, or at best, prototheoretical. The purpose of