A prevalent feature of typical spontaneous speech are speech pauses. Longer speech pauses, known as cognitive pauses, occur in typical speech and are indicative of higher-level cognitive processes. Atypical cognitive pauses, however, are prevalent in the speech of people with aphasia consequent to their communication disorder. Research has shown that these atypical pauses may contribute to negative listener perceptions. This study aimed to determine the influence of atypical speech pause on listener perceptions of communicative effectiveness and speaker likeability. Specifically, this study evaluated the relationship between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability and acoustic measures of between-utterance pause duration, within-utterance pause duration, and the location of within-utterance pauses. This study also examined the relationship between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability. Target stimuli included 30-second samples of speech from two individuals with mild aphasia and four with moderate aphasia. Using a visual analog scale, 40 adult listeners listened to these speech samples and rated each sample according to the speaker's communicative effectiveness and likeability. Overall, listeners were not as sensitive to between-utterance pauses. While listeners were more sensitive to within-utterance pauses greater than one second, they were similarly impacted by within-utterance pauses between 250-999 milliseconds. Listeners were also more affected by pauses at the beginning of an utterance than at the end of an utterance. Results also demonstrated a strong positive correlation between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability. In general, results suggest that the location and length of pauses in the speech of people with aphasia have an impact on listeners' perceptions. In combination with future research, the results of this study will provide a deeper understanding of the impact of cognitive pause in people with aphasia, thus improving future clinical assessment and treatment of aphasia.

This study is an investigation of communicative effectiveness and attitudes in relation to deviation from Standard English in an international church in Stockholm. This church is an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) setting as the congregation consists almost entirely of people who use English as a means of communication with people who do not share their own first language. The study is based on empirical data from both qualitative and quantitative methods. The spoken language was investigated by analyzing one transcribed sermon and through interviewing two speakers of American English. Also a survey was done with 26 members of the church, obtaining quantitative data as well as several comments from the respondents on their view of the usage of English in the sermons and in the church in general.  The results from the study showed as expected that there were a number of deviations from Standard English when ELF was used in the sermon. However, these caused little irritation and were judged not to cause much misunderstanding. The deviations that did cause some irritation among the respondents from the church were when the wrong word was used as well as when a word was pronounced incorrectly. The results indicated that there was little disturbance regarding the communicativeness and attitudes in connection to the spoken English in this ELF setting.