ABSTRACT
The research reported in this paper was stimulated by the work on hesitation phenomena carried out by F.Goldman-Eisler, and by Bernstein’s theoretical and practical work in connection with the differences in language which correspond to different social class groups. Goldman-Eisler has demonstrated, in a series of studies, the relationship between hesitation in speech, verbal planning, and information content (Goldman-Eisler, 1958 a and b, 1961 a-d). Bernstein, in an experiment performed in 1962, applied these findings to samples of speech (group discussions) taken from adolescent boys, and compared the hesitations of a group of middleclass boys with those of a group of working-class boys. He predicted that the users of a ‘restricted code’, i.e. the working class, would pause less frequently and spend less time pausing, than the middle-class ‘elaborated code’ speakers. An elaborated code is associated with ‘higher levels of structural organization and lexical selection’ and with ‘the preparation and delivery of relatively explicit meaning’, and will therefore entail more verbal planning, and hence longer and more frequent pauses (Bernstein, 1962). Bernstein’s experiment gave findings in the predicted direction, but was based on a small sample, with great variation in the output of individual speakers.
