Pausing preceding and following adverbial clause conjunctions in English: A comparative study of Turkish and native speakers of English

The primary purpose of the research was to identify any possible difference between native English and non-native Turkish speakers of English in terms of their pausing durations preceding and following adverbial clause conjunctions in English. To do this, 15 native and 40 Turkish participants have been made to read a total of 40 sentences which contained five different adverbial clause conjunctions (namely when, because, whereas, although, and if). The recordings were transferred to the computer and the pausing durations were analyzed using a sound editor software. As a result of t-tests comparing the mean durations of pausing preceding and following the conjunctions, it was detected that there were statistically significant differences between the native and non-native groups concerning two of the five conjunctions. While native speakers of English paused significantly longer preceding all the conjunctions than following them, Turkish participants are found to do just the opposite for because. Besides, no statistically significant difference between pausing preceding and following whereas in the read speech of the Turkish participants was detected. In the causal analysis of the difference between native and non-native participants, we utilized two research methods. On the one hand, the analysis of pausing preceding and following çünkü and oysa, two Turkish discourse connectives corresponding to because and whereas respectively, pointed to the fact that the idiosyncracy concerning because and whereas did not depend on transfer from Turkish, at least for read speech. On the other hand, unstructured interviews done with 10 of the 40 non-native participants revealed that the difference between native and non-native pausing patterns may have stemmed from three types of transfer: (i) transfer from teacher and teaching practices, (ii) transfer of cognitive planning habits in spontaneous speech to read speech, and (iii) transfer from other learners. Since the study was of quasi-experimental nature, the non-native participants were divided into two equal groups: Experimental Group and Control Group. The EG was provided with awareness training for 10 hours about their idiosyncratic pausing patterns, whereas the CG was not exposed to any kind of training. The posttest analysis of the pausing durations preceding and following the conjunctions revealed that the treatment was effective in making the non-native participants in the EG aware of the correct pausing patterns. The findings showed that they started to use the native speaker pausing norms, while the CG remained idiosyncratic.