A Comparative Analysis of Pausing in Child and Adult Storytelling

The goals of the current study were (1) to assess differences in child and adult pausing, and (2) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from ten 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of pause frequency, duration, variation in durations, and pause location indicated that pause time decreased with retelling, but not with age group except when child and adult pausing was considered in its speech and language context. The results suggest that differences in child and adult pausing reflect differences in child and adult language, not in the cognitive resources allocated to language production.