On the Cognitive Status of Pauses in Discourse Production

This chapter discusses some aspects concerning the cognitive status of pauses in research on discourse production. It starts with a concise review of some of the ‘canonical’ studies on language production in which the pause analytical methodology is adopted. Section 2 discusses methods of collecting pause data and constructing pause databases. Section 3 addresses one key issue: The empirical status of pauses. First, it is shown that the relation between pauses and cognitive processes in discourse production can be maintained by looking at what happens in the immediate neighbourhood of pauses. Based on an analysis of actual transcripts, four kinds of pauses are distinguished: Pauses signalling retrieving, pauses signalling monitoring and pauses signalling repairing processes. Secondly, this section discusses how pause time variances can be interpreted in terms of underognitive processes, and the section concludes with a discussion of how pauses are related to text structural characteristics. The fourth section discusses various statistical methods for analysing pause data, showing the kind of research questions that can be addressed by each method.