The Effects of Pauses on the Listening Process of Japanese EFL Learners

In order to survey the effects of pause on EFL learners’ listening comprehension, two experiments were conducted. The purpose of Experiment 1 is to examine the influence of the following three parameters: (1) The grammatical complexity of the sentence; (2) the location of silent pauses; and (3) the frequency of pauses within the sentence. The results of the experiment show the following effects of pause on listening comprehension: (1) Listeners achieved higher scores when listening to sentences with one pause, two pauses, and no pause, respectively. (2) The shortest sentence (7 syllables in length) with no pause inserted was the hardest to perceive for the EFL listeners. That is, sentence length does not seem to have much effect on perception. (3) The score of sentences which have longer subjects (noun phrase+propositional phrase) was lower than in other sentences with different grammatical constructions. (4) The listening score increased for words immediately followed by a pause. The purpose of Experiment 2 is to analyze the effects that pause length have on Japanese EFL learners’ listening performance. The result shows that pause length does not affect the overall listening process except for in cases of a certain sentence type. The above findings lead us to conclude that one pause in a sentence of 9 to 14 syllables in length facilitates learner’s listening process regardless with the length of each pause.