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This discussion examines how speaker pauses, both filled and silent, are keyed to functions within a conversation and to functions within narration. In Alzheimer's discourse, pause-fillers can be both placeholders and hesitation markers; they may be ohs and ums or longer formulaic phrases. Extracts from the speech of 4 older women from the United States and from New Zealand are reviewed for changes in syntactic complexity, for retention of story components, and for pauses. The extracts illustrate these functions for silent pauses: as word-finding; as planning at word, phrase, and narrative component levels; and as pragmatic compensation as other interactional and narrative skills decrease.

Māori and English have been in increasing contact within New Zealand for over 200 years. The impact of each language on the other in vocabulary, which has been borrowed in both directions, is clear. More subtle is the mutual influence in the area of pronunciation. The MAONZE project has been investigating changes in the pronunciation of Māori and of the English of speakers of Māori, using recordings of seven kaumātua born in the 19th century who were interviewed by the Mobile Unit of Radio New Zealand in the 1940s (referred to in the text as the TK group), of ten kaumātua alive today (K), and of ten younger speakers (T). This paper describes our methodology and reports the results of the investigation of the long and short vowels of Māori as well as of some diphthongs. These were all studied acoustically, that is to say, using computers to analyse the sound waves characteristic of each sound. For each vowel and diphthong, and for each speaker, we attempted to analyse thirty examples, though some sounds are relatively rare, such as /ī/ and /ao/, so that this target could not always be achieved. The analysis did indeed find that there had been shifts in the pronunciation of these sounds over the three generations of speakers in the study. Except for the distinction between /a/ and /ā/, the length and qualitative difference between the historical long and short vowels is decreasing. Most striking is the shift in /u/ and /ū/ to a much more forward position in the mouth, a change which parallels movement in English. The five diphthongs studied were /au, ou, ao, ai, ae/, all of which are clearly distinct in the speech of the TK and K groups, but which are tending to merge to three in the younger group, who no longer distinguish tae and tai or hau and hou so clearly. Within the T group, we distinguished between those who had been speaking Māori since birth (R1), and those who had acquired good Māori at school or later (R2). It turned out that in all the changes taking place, the R2-T group is leading the way, and is thus probably the direction the language will take into the future, particularly as the majority of younger speakers of Māori these days belong to this category.

Approximately 20 percent of the original settlers to New Zealand came from Scotland, and Scottish influence is still visible around New Zealand and in New Zealand English (NZE) vocabulary. But the phonological systems of NZE and Scottish English are so different that it is difficult to see any residual influence of the early Scottish settlers in New Zealand pronunciation today. In this study, the authors use a database of historical recordings held in the Origins of New Zealand English project to track the possible influence of the early Scottish settlers on modern NZE phonology. They show that although the centralized vowel in the lexical set of KIT is not a legacy from the early Scottish settlers, Scottish English nevertheless had a discernible influence as NZE developed out of the initial dialect-contact situation in which the first European settlers found themselves.