Adult-child discourse: The conversational relevance of pauses

Abstract

The present investigation examined 2 to 3 year old children's responses to pauses compared to their responses to other classes of adult behavior within child initiated request sequences. The results indicated that the children responded differentially to neutral and negative adult responses. However, only some, children made a similar distinction between long pauses, inter-utterance pauses greater than one second, and short pauses, inter-utterance pauses of one second or less. The data contributes to our understanding of the young child's responses to pauses and highlights the need for empirical validation of discourse segmentation procedures.