The Common Value of Pausing Time in Spontaneous Speech

Experiments have shown that hesitation increases both before and during speech concerned with the solution of verbal tasks which involve an increasing degree of syntactic or semantic complexity. These experiments have been concerned with differences between tasks. An attempt is made to compare hesitation time between individuals who are set the same tasks, in terms of the quality of their responses to the tasks. Individual dispositions to a characteristic speech-silence ratio complicate such comparisons. Here a strong trend was found between the quality of the subjects' responses and the extra time they took over and above their characteristic speech-silence ratios.