ABSTRACT
PAUSAL phenomena in spontaneous speech, those fleeting periods of silence and nonlexical phonation, have, over the last quarter-century, assumed a conceptual significance roughly inversely proportional to their duration. On one hand, speech hesitations have been shown to play an important role in social perception in that they are associated with judgments of deception (Kraut, 1978; Zuckerman, DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981), competence (Brown, Strong, & Rencher, 1973; Lay & Burron, 1968), and social attractiveness (Brown, Strong, & Rencher, 1973; Street & Brady, 1982). Perhaps even more important than the role that pausal phenomena play in social perception, however, are the clues that they provide concerning the processes of behavioral production (see Butterworth, 1980a; Rochester, 1975; Siegman & Feldstein, 1979).
