A Preliminary Study on Silent Pauses in L1 and L2 Speakers of English and German

Pause is one of the phonic features that, together with pause and melody, affect the semantic aspect of communication. Pause is a suprasegmental feature responsible for segmenting an utterance into shorter stretches and drawing hearers' attention to important bits of information. Thus, it is an important universal means in perception and production of an utterance. The aim of the present paper is to provide the comparative analysis of the above-mentioned prosodic feature through exploration of the similarities and differences in semantically identical utterances in micro-textual units in colloquial style produced by L1 and L2 speakers of English. and German.