Pausing Strategies as Means of Information Processing in Spontaneous Narratives

This paper investigates the role of pause in the process of information organization in narrative discourse. Following the cognitive research on pausing strategies, the present study assumes that the frequency of pause usage varies as a function of the content of the individual sections in a narrative. The material used for the analysis consisted of a number of spontaneous narratives. The results failed to demonstrate any association between type of information and pausing phenomena, but it revealed the existence of a pattern of varying hesitancy that generally correspond to the different sections in a narrative. This would suggest that pausing in narrative is primarily governed by the cognitive rhythm of speech ([11], [9], [5]).