Reading is a breakthrough of study of prosodically oral production of English as a second language. It is also the most simplified oral production. The pause is a necessary part of colloquial English and it 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. In this study a qualitative analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ miscues in pause placement is conducted by comparing between the native English speakers and EFL learners on reading the same English story. The results show, EFL learners’ miscues in pause placement mainly focuses on: wrong pauses correlated to the noun clauses i.e. that-clauses, what –clauses and the final reporting phrases; Wrong pauses in connection to relative clauses without punctuation mark; i.e., the defining relative clause; Incorrect pauses within the sense group related to the conjunctions i.e., but, and; semantically and physiologically relevant errors-silent juncture pauses co-occur with other hesitation phenomena i.e. Self-correction, repetition and reformulation in Chinese EFL learners’ read speech.

Jing Chen. A Qualitative Study of Miscues in Pause Placement in Chinese EFL Learners’ Read Speech. International Journal of New Developments in Education (2023) Vol. 5, Issue 16: 136-141. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJNDE.2023.051625.

[1] Bosˇkovic’ Zˇ. (2001). On the Nature of the Syntax-Phonology Interface: Cliticization and Related Phenomena. Oxford: Elsevier Science. 

[2] Brotherton P. (1979). Speaking and not speaking: processes for translating ideas into speech. In A. W. Siegman & S. Feldstein (Eds. ), Of speech and time (pp. 179–209). New York: Wiley. 

[3] Brow n G. et al. (1980). Questions of Intonation. London: Croom Helm. 

[4] Burger S. (2005). Lexicon for the transliteration of spontaneous speech. Retrieved Jan 12, 2013, from Http: / / www. ldc. upenn. edu/ Catalog/ docs/ LDC2004T10/ isl-transcr-lex. pdf. 

[5] Celik M. (2004). Teaching English intonation to EFL/ESL students. The Internet TESL Journal. Available at http://iteslj. org/Techniques/Celik-Intonation. htm 

[6] Cenoz J. (1998). Pauses and communicative strategies in second language speech. Reports Reasearch, 143, 25-36. 

[7] Cooper W. E. & J. Paccia-Cooper (1980). Syntax and Speech. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

[8] Cruttenden A. (1997). Intonation (2nd ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

[9] Deschamps A. (1980). The syntactical distribution of pauses in English spoken as a second language by French students. In H. W. Dechert & M. Raupach (Eds. ), Temporal variables in speech (pp. 255-262). The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton. 

[10] Dehe´ N., (2009). Clausal parentheticals, intonational phrasing and prosodic theory. Journal of Linguistics 45 (3), 569–615. 

[11] D’Imperio M., Elordieta G., Frota S., Prieto P., & Viga´ rio M., (2005). Intonational phrasing in Romance: the role of syntactic and prosodic structure. In: Frota, S., Viga´rio, M., Freitas, M. J. (Eds.), Prosodies: With Special Reference to Iberian Languages (pp. 59–97). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 

[12] Fant G., Kruckenberg A., & Ferreira J. B. (2003). Individual variations in pausing. A study of read speech. In Proceedings of Fonetik, Reports in Phonetics, Umea University, PHONUM, Vol. 9(pp. 193-196)

[13] Ferreira F. (1993). Creation of prosody during sentence production. Psychological Review, 100, 233-253. 

[14] Ghini M., 1993. Phi-formation in Italian: a new proposal. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 12, 41–79. 

[15] Grosjean F., Grosjean, L., & Lane, H. (1979). The patterns of silence: Performance structures in sentence production. Cognitive Psychology, 11, 58–81. 

[16] Gustafson-Cˇ apkova´S. & Megyesi B., (2001). A Comparative Study of Pauses in Dialogues and Read Speech. Proceedings of Eurospeech, 2, 931-935. 

[17] Juffs A. (1990). Tone, syllable structure and interlanguage phonology: Chinese learners’stress errors. IRAL 28, 2, 99-117. 

[18] Krivokapić J. (2007a). Prosodic planning: Effects of phrasal length and complexity on pause duration. Journal of Phonetics, 35, 162-179. 

[19] Krivokapić J. (2007b). The planning, production, and percetion of prosdic structure. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation. University of Southern Canlfornia. 

[20] Megyesi B, Gustafson-Capkova S. (2002). Production and perception of pauses and their linguistic context in read and spontaneous speech in Swedish. The 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP, Denver, USA. 

[21] Nespor M., Vogel, I., (1986). Prosodic Phonology. Dordrecht: Foris. 

[22] Nespor M., Vogel, I., (2007). Prosodic Phonology: With a new Foreword. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 

[23] O'Connell D. C. & Kowal S. (1983). Pausology. Computers in Language Research, 2(19), 221-301. 

[24] O’Connor J. D. & G. F. Arnold. (1973). Intonation of Colloquial English (2nd Edition). London: Longman. 4. 

[25] Oliveira M. (2002). The role of pause occurrence and pause duration in the signaling of narrative structure. Paper presented at the Advances in Natural Language Processing. 3rd International Conference, PorTAL, Faro, Portugal. 

[26] Radanovic’–Kocic’ V. 1988. The grammar of Serbo-Croatian clitics: A synchronic and diachronic perspective. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

[27] Radanovic’–Kocic’ V. 1996. Placement of Serbo-Croatian clitics: A prosodic approach. In A. Halpern & A. Zwicky (Eds.), In approaching second: Second position clitics and related phenomena (pp. 429–445). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 

[28] Richards C. J., J. Platt & H. Platt. (1990). Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics. London: Longman Group Ltd., 500. 

[29] Rosenfield B. (1987). Pauses in Oral and Written Narratives. Boston University, Boston. 

[30] Sandalo F., Truckenbrodt H., (2002). Some notes on phonological phrasing in Brazilian Portuguese. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 42, pp. 285–310. 

[31] Schutze C. (1994). Serbo-Croatian second position clitic placement and the phonology-syntax interface. In A. Carnie, H. Harley & T. Bures (Eds.), In Papers on phonology and morphology: MIT working papers in linguistics 21, (pp. 373–473). Cambridge, MA: MITWPL. 

[32] Selkirk E. (2000). The interaction of constraints on prosodic phrasing. In: M. Horne (Ed.), Prosody: Theory and Experiment (pp. 231–262). Dordrecht: Kluwer. 

[33] Simone R. (1990). Fondamenti di Linguistica. Editori Laterza: Bari. 

[34] Strangert E. (1991). Pausing in texts read aloud. In: Proceedings of the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, Service des Publications, Vol. 4, pp. 238-241. 

[35] Swerts M. (1997). Prosodic Features at Discourse Boundaries of Different Strength. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101(1), 514-521. 

[36] Watson D. & E. Gibson (2004). The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 19, 713-755. 

[37] Zec D., Inkelas S. (1990). Prosodically constrained syntax. In S. kelas & D. Zec (Eds.), The Phonology–Syntax Connection (pp. 365–378). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

[38] Zellner B. (1994). Pauses and the temporal structure of speech. In E. Keller (Ed.), In Fundamentals of speech synthesis and speech recognition (pp. 41-62). John Wiley & Sons.