Arab Educational Information Network

The sixties and seventies of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in the field of pausology. The interest presented a number of studies aiming at measuring the acoustic features of speech, specially pauses. Previous studies have investigated the repeated word- sequences, the length of words or types of pauses in languages other than English. The present study investigates whether filled pauses are used by native and non-native speakers of English in two different styles of speech, namely; read-aloud and spontaneous. Two tests are conducted, to investigate the validity of the immediately above mentioned statement, on a sample of American, British subjects on the one hand, and Iraqi EFL students from the Department of English Language, College of Education for Humanties and College of Arts, University of Basra on the other. An ANOVA analysis was applied to show the differences between the two groups of participants in the two styles of speech.