If you observe people's daily communication and spontaneous speech, you will find an interesting phenomenon. Apart from words, phrases and sentences, human speech contains many pauses, such as "um" and "uh" in English or "呃" and "嗯" in Chinese. Pauses are important indicator of speakers' verbal planning and self-monitoring of speech production.
A new study has now uncovered the pausing strategies in young children's story-telling.
Led by Dr. LI Su from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, researchers analyzed the frequency of pauses, the categories of pauses and the pausing position when Chinese preschoolers told stories from a picture book without words.
According to the researchers, the total pausing frequency showed significant age and gender differences, with five-year-olds pausing less than four-year-olds, and boys pausing more than girls. This suggests that language planning and production in preschool children improves with age, and that gender differences in language fluency may emerge early in childhood development.
They identified four categories of pauses: the silent pause, the filled pause, the repair pause and words repetition. The silent pause was the most common type of pause, suggesting that, at least at the age of four to five, children have a poor ability to coordinate and monitor the interaction between 'thinking' and 'speaking' in narratives.
In addition, four- to five-year-olds produced more pauses within sentences, indicating that young children prefer to plan smaller syntactic units in their narratives. Interestingly, the researchers found that girls tended to produce more within-clause pauses, while boys preferred to produce more between-clause pauses. "It seems that preschool boys and girls use different verbal planning strategies during the process of speech production," said Dr. LI.
Furthermore, children's pausing frequency is closely associated with their verbal working memory and vocabulary knowledge. The greater the children's working memory capacity and vocabulary knowledge, the fewer pauses they had in their stories. Children's working memory can significantly predict with-clause pauses, indicating that children's limited cognitive processing resources will affect the position of pauses in their narratives.
The study provides important empirical evidence not only for the development of language production but also as a reference for various clinical populations with language impairments, which could contribute to a deeper understanding and detection of young children's language formulation deficits.
This work was published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research entitled "The Pausing Strategies in Chinese Preschool Children's Narratives" on Feb. 9, and it was supported the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
