Pauses, Clauses, Sentences

The tool of pause measurement was applied to the question of the psychological reality of syntactic structures in spontaneous speech. The material investigated covered a wide field of speech productions, of different speakers and different speech tasks. Their analysis showed that the hierarchy of syntactic structures is reflected differentially in the pause structure of spontaneous speech. When readings of the spontaneous texts were compared with the original spontaneous speech it emerged that the reading process modifies the pausing for different syntactic structures differently. Sentences as distinct from clauses are marked by their temporal cohesion in spontaneous speech as well as in reading. This fact is discussed with reference to Wundt's analytical theory of sentence-wholes.