Interruptions and Silences in Discourse : A Comparative Study

Abstract

This paper reports on a study which compared interruptions and silences in discourse of Japanese Speakers of English (JSE's) with Canadian Native Speakers of English (NSE's). Contrary to expectation there was no significant difference in either the total number of interruptions, for each speaker or between the two cultural groups. With silences, in depth statistical analysis was not carried out due to the very few silences that were observed. However, simple mathematical calculations showed that contrary to expectation, the NSE group had more long silences than the JSE group. Overall, the JSE group had an equal amount of inter- and intra-turn silences while the NSE group had twice as many intra-turn silences as inter-turn silences.