The paper investigates pauses as one of the paralinguistic signs that limit human speech from the theoretical point of view. Pauses are briefly defined as sections of speech without text. Their duration varies depending on the context, but does not exceed more than two minutes. They are conditioned by physiological needs, cognitive processes and emotional states as well as some learned actions, which primarily refer to making grammatical pauses in accordance with punctuation. They have a role within the prosody of the sentence, in layer of expressiveness and the layer of clamours, while at the level lower than the sentence (the layer of phonemes and the layer of prosody of words) pauses cannot be observed at all. Pauses occur in both public and spontaneous speech. On the one hand, they are intentional and planned, and on the other, immediate and natural, which is why their distribution in these two discourses is significantly different. The classification of pauses is based on two basic criteria: sonority and function. According to the sonority, pauses are divided into silent or voiceless and filled or loud. The second classification is realized according to the functional key and in our literature the most dominant classification is the Škarić's where five types of pauses are recognized: delimitation pauses, emphasis pauses, lexical pauses, processing pauses and speech interruptions pauses. This classification is augmented by Horga, who introduces mixed pauses to the list. Emphasis is on spontaneous speech as a true picture of living speech, and on the pauses of hesitation that are primarily associated with it. Thus, the subtype of processing pauses was investigated, with several of its realizations in speech supported by examples.