Pauses when reading aloud play an essential role in reading and listening comprehension (for a review: Godde et al., 2020). Among the various types of pauses, breathing pauses during oral reading are particularly important. Their placement, frequency and duration tell us about breath and voice coordination as well as articulatory planning. These skills that develop over time, from the early stages of reading acquisition to skilled reading levels, are under-researched. The present study aims to describe how children develop the ability to use pauses during oral reading by comparing young French speaking readers ranging from second to seventh graders to adults. Voice and breathing patterns of 295 children and 20 adults were recorded during oral reading. Specific attention was given to the frequency, duration and placement of breathing pauses and inhalation to phonation delay. Our results revealed that the youngest students performed more ungrammatical pauses, breathed more frequently and produced longer inhalation to phonation delays. Children older than grade 4 were visibly more proficient at planning their pauses, particularly their breathing pauses, and tended to rely more on punctuation. Finally, pause planning observed for the grade 7 students was almost at adult level. This developmental study suggests that children’s acquisition of pausing patterns during oral reading occurs gradually between the 2nd and 7th grades and highlights the important role of punctuation in planning breathing pauses and syntactic-prosodic breaks. Based on our results, we discuss the relation between pauses, decoding and expressivity, and develop didactic proposals for developing oral reading prosody.

大声朗读时的暂停在阅读和听力理解中起着至关重要的作用（综述：Godde等人，2020年）。在各种类型的停顿中，口头阅读过程中的呼吸停顿尤为重要。它们的位置，频率和持续时间告诉我们有关呼吸和声音协调以及关节计划的信息。从阅读的早期阶段到熟练的阅读水平，随着时间的推移而发展的这些技能尚未得到充分研究。本研究旨在通过比较从二年级到七年级到成人的讲法语的年轻读者，来描述儿童在口头阅读过程中如何发展使用暂停的能力。口头阅读期间记录了295名儿童和20名成人的声音和呼吸模式。特别注意了频率，呼吸暂停的持续时间和位置以及吸入到发声延迟。我们的结果表明，年龄最小的学生表现出更多的不合语法的停顿，呼吸更加频繁，并且产生了更长的吸入时间直至发声延迟。显然，大于4年级的孩子更熟练地计划他们的停顿，尤其是他们的呼吸停顿，并且倾向于更多地使用标点符号。最后，对7年级学生观察到的暂停计划几乎处于成人水平。这项发展性研究表明，儿童在口头阅读过程中获得暂停模式的过程在2年级和7年级之间逐渐发生，并突显了标点符号在计划呼吸暂停和句法间歇期间的重要作用。根据我们的结果，我们讨论了暂停，解码和表现力之间的关系，