More laws for pauses: Replication and generalization.

Abstract

The basic timescales governing animal life are generally determined by body size. Pauses in naturally occurring human speech were investigated to determine if pause timescales are also sensitive to body size. Reported is an analysis of pause duration allometry in recorded interviews of 61 athletes. Pauses were divided into three classes based on whether they occurred during fluid speech or whether they preceded or followed a filled pause (i.e., “um”). Allometric laws relating body size to pause size were found for all three classes—larger people take longer pauses. The derived allometric exponents were used to evaluate a theory of how people experience the passage of time. The theory associates the experience of time passage with the distal flow of time through the mathematics of bounded exponential growth. Nonlinearities inherent in the theory are shown to predict, in detail, the way body size interacts with linguistic context in the deployment of pauses. The theory provides a meaningful framework for understanding how time is experienced as a felt quantity and how pauses are negotiated in everyday speech.