Hesitations in Maternal Speech

Abstract

To investigate the possibility that a significant source of segmentation information concerning the syntactic structure of sentences might be present in hesitation placement in maternal speech, mothers were recorded speaking to their youngest children, between 2:0 and 3:6, and to their older children, between 5:0 and 8:0. Hesitations occurred more often at sentence boundaries in speech to younger children. However, using three distinct definitions of phrase-boundary, no tendency was found for hesitations to occur more often at phrase-boundaries in speech to younger children.