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Abstract This paper analyses the different temporal variables of English and French in a similar linguistic task, namely radio-interviews. Both languages show a great deal of similarities, but differ considerably with regard to silent pauses and the distribution of the secondary variables. A tentative explanation for these differences is given; it is partly based on the hypothesis that the two languages have the same over-all behaviour in view of a given linguistic task, but differ in the distribution of the simple variables. A compensation would therefore take place at the level of the simple variables leading to identical central values for the complex variables of the two languages.
Grosjean et al. (Thu,) studied this question.