Word class influences the duration of silent pauses, which are shorter before nouns and longer before conjunctions. Children with SLI produce longer silent pauses, possibly because of their language processing difficulties.

Due to their linguistic impairment, children with SLI had longer silent pauses in their narratives. Story complexity influenced the average time of silent pauses in the narratives of children with typical language development, but this difference did not occur in the narratives of children with SLI.

Purpose: The study aim was to determine whether the mean duration of silent pauses depends on the word class (open or closed) and to compare the duration for each type of word between children with typical language development and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Methods: The study included 40 children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI, aged between 7 and 10 years.Each subject produced 15 story narratives based on a separate sequence of four pictures for each narrative. After the transcription of the samples, the words were classified as open class (noun, adjective, verb, adverb, and numeral) or closed class (article, preposition, pronoun, conjunction, and interjection). In the second phase of the study, the samples were analyzed using software specific to the analysis of silent pauses and the duration (milliseconds) of the pauses that occurred immediately before each of these grammatical categories was recorded. Results: In both groups, silent pauses were longer when preceding closed class words and individuals in the SLI group produced longer silent pauses than their peers did. Conclusion: The duration of a silent pause varied according to the grammatical class of the preceded word and it was shorter when followed by an open class word. In addition, the fact that individuals with SLI produce longer silent pauses than their peers confirms that their language processing is slower.Keywords: Child language; Language development disorders; Narration; Speech, language and hearing sciences; Language development RESUMO Objetivo: Verificar se o tempo médio das pausas silentes difere para a classe das palavras (aberta ou fechada) e se há diferença entre esse tempo para crianças em desenvolvimento típico de linguagem e crianças com distúrbio específico de linguagem (DEL), em cada tipo de palavra. Métodos