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Abstract Abstract: Unnatural pauses, perceived as interruptions in the speech flow, are significant in marking affected L2 English oral reading fluency. The present study investigated 38 listeners’ perception of unnatural pauses in Chinese learners’ English read speech. The study found that the perception of unnatural pauses was affected not only by the duration and syntactic location of the pauses, but also by the phonological errors in the read speech. Longer pauses and within-in phrase pauses were more easily perceived as unnatural. However, perceived unnatural pauses also included extremely short pauses (<133ms), subjective pauses (=0ms), and pauses at phrase/clause boundaries when they broke the tight semantic bonds. Besides, phonological errors played a similar role to pauses as prosodic boundary cues in the perception. The findings of this study have implications for the English teaching and research in China.
Key words: unnatural pause; perception; read speech
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