Bello-Lepe, S., Mahmood, S., Varley, R., Zimmerer, V. (2024). Speech pauses in speakers with and without aphasia: A usage-based approach. Cortex, 178, 287-298. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2024.06.012

When we speak, we can make pauses to emphasize, to give the listener time to reflect, or for other pragmatic/conversational reasons. But most pauses in speech, whether filled (“um …”) or silent, are disruptions. We may struggle with finding a word, or with planning a sentence. We may even struggle to put together a thought. Most pauses happen when our cognition can’t keep pace with our speech rate.

For that reason, we investigate speech pauses to learn more about language as ias we produce it. The presence and duration of pauses reveal when we face additional processing demands, and can inform us about which properties of language matter. For example, we are more likely to make a pause before a complex sentence, or before a verb rather than a noun. Pauses also provide insights into language impairment, for example following stroke. This paper identifies a new relevant variable for understanding pauses in people with aphasia (a language disorder following brain damage) and healthy controls.

This is work carried out by Sebastián Bello-Lepe under my supervision. Putting the final touches on it after he died was extremely difficult for me. It also made me think more about the “bus factor”, about which I am going to talk later in this post.