Hesitation Pauses at Clause Boundaries in Pakistani English and Urdu: A Cross-Linguistic Study with Speaker Reflections

Abstract

This study investigates the distribution of hesitation pauses at clause boundaries in spontaneous Pakistani English and Urdu speech, examined from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspectives. Original speech data were collected from 10 Pakistani English and 10 Urdu adult speakers, yielding approximately 110 minutes of spontaneous narration. Six participants additionally completed structured speaker-reflection interviews to examine their metalinguistic awareness of hesitation behaviour. Each hesitation pause token was coded as either Clause Boundary (CB) or Clause Internal (CI), and the positional distribution was tested against chance expectation using chi-square analysis. Results showed that 71% of hesitation pauses in Pakistani English and 64% in Urdu occurred at clause boundaries, replicating and extending Hawkins' (1971) clause-boundary hypothesis in a cross-linguistic South Asian context for the first time. . Findings are interpreted within Levelt's (1983, 1993) Incremental Sentence Planning Theory and grounded in neurolinguistic evidence — including ERP and neuroimaging studies of syntactic planning — for elevated processing load at clause boundaries.