pauserna

Pauserna refers to the discrete pauses that occur during spoken language, functioning as cues for structure and processing. They are distinguished from hesitations such as uh and um, and from breathing interruptions.

The term pauserna is Swedish, combining pauser (pauses) with the definite plural suffix -na, and has been used in Scandinavian linguistic literature since the late 20th century to describe pause phenomena in spontaneous and read-aloud speech.

Typical pauserna vary in duration. Short micro-pauses often last under 0.25 seconds; longer boundary pauses may range from 0.3 to 0.7 seconds or more. Pauserna occur at sentence and clause boundaries, before new discourse segments, or to signal emphasis. They aid turn-taking and mark information structure.

Researchers annotate pauserna in corpora, classifying by duration and function. Acoustic analysis, spectrograms, and interval measurements are used to study their properties. Cross-linguistic research shows variations in pauserna use between languages, registers, and speaking styles.

Applications include making speech synthesis sound more natural by inserting appropriate pauserna, informing language teaching and listening skills, and supporting clinical assessments of speech planning and retrieval in disorders.