| Abstract |
| Pauses can be used to facilitate certain
operations involved in the production and in the perception of speech. In the case
of speech perception, pauses have been found to improve the accuracy of detection and the
recall of lists of digits and letters. The aim of the present experiments was to
examine the effects of pause time on the perception of sentences. In experiment I, a
semantic categorization task was used and in experiment II a sentence recall task.
The results indicated that in sentences containing pauses between clauses, words were
categorized more rapidly (experiment I) and propositions were recalled more accurately
(experiment II) than in sentences containing pauses within the clause. The results
are interpreted in the context of existing models of speech processing, and the
significance of pause time for cognitive activity is discussed. |
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