Speech Pauses among Bilingual Students of the English Language and Literature

This thesis investigates speech pauses among bilingual students of the English language and literature. Specifically, it compares the number and the location of their speech pauses in English and in Croatian. Hesitation phenomena, in general, are a fundamental part of spontaneous speech. Thus, it is to be expected that for speakers who are highly proficient in any two languages, there should not be significant differences in regards to the number and the location of speech pauses. The theoretical background describes the stages of spontaneous speech, offers the classification of hesitation phenomena, proposes the possible functions of speech pauses and illustrates the types of bilingualism, which are important to differentiate for the purposes of the study. The second part of the thesis presents the study of speech pauses in English and Croatian among ten students of the graduate programs of the English language and literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. Given that the participants were native speakers of Croatian and were highly proficient in English, it was hypothesized that the number and the location of speech pauses in these two languages would be approximately the same. The analysis of speech samples in English and Croatian showed that the number of pauses was roughly the same in English and Croatian (103 and 112, respectively) and in both languages, the participants mostly paused in sentence-initial positions or before major syntactic units, such as clauses.