The paper deals with a new method of calculating duration of pauses. The method is based on the assumption that a physical pause is a kind of the articulation gesture (or their sequence) , which the speaker applies for segmenting speech flow which he produces. Mean duration of such gesture can be measured using the average syllable duration values of a particular speaker. The results of the experiment described show that the use of the average syllable duration as a unit for measuring pause duration allows to calculate duration of physical pauses between minor and major units with reliable accuracy.