A usual extreme case : pause reports of informal spontaneous dialogue

In an experiment of pause reports, native speakers of American English, French, & German were asked to report pauses & estimate their duration in English & German texts of informal spontaneous dialogue. Ss (N = 49) listened to two recorded conversations - one in English & one in German - & were provided with a text of each conversation on which to record the location & duration of pauses. Results demonstrated that in both English & German texts, estimates of pause duration at actual pause positions were significantly longer than those at false alarm positions where there were no actual pauses in the test. Significant differences in accuracy across language groups were limited to the German corpus; fluency in German was associated with greater accuracy. 2 Tables, 10 References. Adapted from the source document