Children’s Organization of Discourse Structure Through Pausing Means

This study aims to investigate on how different kinds of pausing strategies, such as empty and filled pauses, and phoneme lengthening are used by children to shape the discourse structure in Italian, and to identify how many of the silent intervals can be attributed to the amount of given and added information the speaker is conveying in the speech flow. To this aim a cross-modal analysis (video and audio) of spontaneous narratives produced by male and female children (9 plus-minus 3 months years old) was performed. Empty speech pauses were divided into three categories according to their duration: a) short – from 0.150 up to 0.500 s long; b) medium – from 0.501 up to 0.900 s long; c) long – more than 0.900 s long. The analysis showed that each of the above categories seems to play a different role in the children discourse organization, Children pause, like adults, to recover from their memory the new information they try to convey. Higher is the recovery effort, longer is the pausing time. Longer are the pauses, lower is the probability that they can be associated to a given information Most of the long pauses (96% for female and 94% for male) are associated to a change of scene suggesting that long pauses are favored by children in signaling discourse boundaries. The consistency, among subjects, in the distribution of speech pauses seems to suggest that, at least in Italian, there is an intrinsic model of timing, probably a very coarse model, that speakers use to regulate speech flow and discourse organization.