| The primary objective of this study is to gain an understanding of the thinking processes involved in the production of spontaneous English speech made by native Japanese speakers from the viewpoint of hesitation pause phenomena, and to investigate the patterns of hesitation pauses that native Japanese speakers manipulate in their speech.; The data for this study were collected from thirty native Japanese speakers in two groups in the different levels of English language proficiency. The subjects were asked to speak about two topics for about three minutes each. Their speech was tape-recorded and transcribed into Chafe's idea units (1985:106) in normal English orthography by the author of this research. As for the measurement of the duration of unfilled pauses, the computer programs employed converted them on the audio tape into the digital output which revealed their length. After the whole procedure for digitizing all the unfilled pauses and measuring their length was completed, the figure in brackets which indicated the length of each unfilled pause was located at the point where it took place.; The findings showed the following points. To begin with, pausing was as much part of the English speech by native Japanese speakers as vocalized speech itself. Although it was not possible to find a statistically significant difference between the two groups and between the two topics, the results from the quantitative analysis of the data in terms of the ratio of pause time to speech time, mean length of unfilled pauses, and frequency of unfilled pauses consistently demonstrated that there was possibly a correlation between the hesitation pause phenomena and the level of language proficiency. This study also presented where the native Japanese speakers had difficulties in formulating their spontaneous speech in English, how they handle the problems with the use of hesitation pauses, and how those hesitation pauses play their roles at each linguistic phase of the different levels of the speech.; In conclusion, more attention has to be paid to the silences as well as to the sound both in the studies of linguistics and in the field of teaching foreign languages. |
