Pauses and pitch movement as strategies for reading aloud in higher education students

Abstract The non-university academic regulations for Basic Education establish reading aloud within the realm of language and literature as one of several activities that serve to create texts with a playful, artistic, and creative goal, as reading aloud texts forms the foundation for comprehensible and meaningful learning. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to research the competence of primary education teachers. The main objective of this work is to describe pauses and pitch changes as mechanisms for turn-taking. For that purpose, 150 bilingual Basque university students have been recorded and analysed reading aloud a brief narrative text. The results of the study demonstrate that they indeed use pauses as a strategy for role or turn changes, and in the statistical analysis, significant differences are observed, both in terms of frequency and in terms of duration, between orthographically marked pauses (T-pauses) and those that allow a role shift (P-pauses). Comparing the results of the present study with those of Bosch et al. (2005) the observations about reading aloud do not match, since this research shows that P-pauses are significantly longer than T-pauses. This elongation coincides with the role shift represented by the pauses. As a summary of what has been said, this study identifies the following sequences as the most common when reading aloud in Basque: HL[P]HL and H[T]H.