The speech of elderly people tends to be characterised by an increasing number of dysfluencies caused by various age-related factors such as memory limitations, physical weakening of the articulatory organs, and even increased cautiousness.  If both silent and filled pauses, self-corrections, repetitions, and other hesitation phenomena are typical of mother tongue speech of the elderly, it is no wonder that they abound in L2 speech, where the speakers have to face additional problems derived from the very fact that they are producing a non-native language.

     This article focuses on the silent pauses in the L2 English spoken by elderly Finnish men and women in an interview situation. Special attention is paid to the co-occurrence of silent pauses with lexical retrieval problems (manifested as lexical errors), as opposed to the mastery of syntax, which seems to be more automatised and less prone to hesitation.

    The interference of the speakers’ mother tongue, notably the high tolerance of silence that is a prevalent feature of Finnish spoken discourse, is also discussed.  The article is part of a larger study addressing second language attrition due to old age.