In this study, we look at the distribution of silent pauses within existing multi-language corpora to see whether their location and length correlate with any higher-level syntactic groupings in the given languages, and what this can tell us about motivations for pausing phenomena.
In this talk, we will discuss associations between syntactic units and silent pauses in a sample of diverse languages. The relation between pausing and syntactic boundaries has been rarely tested outside of major world languages, with the majority of studies performed in lab conditions utilising reading tasks and/or controlled stimuli. This work represents a first step in the wider testing of the purported correlation of pause length and syntactic unithood using naturalistic data.