Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations

In this study, we look at the distribution of silent pauses within existing multi-language corpora to see whether their location and duration correlate with clause boundaries. Our study is based on data of seven languages from Multi-CAST. We supplemented the original clause boundary annotations with information about silent pauses in order to investigate the alignment of clause boundaries and pausing. We find a gradient association between clause boundary strength and the probability of a pause and a two-way distinction for pause duration within clauses and at clause boundaries.