Cross-linguistic pause and rate phenomena in adults and adolescents

Three groups of 40 Ss (German adolescents and American adults and adolescents) read two passages and retold them. In confirmation of O'Connell Kowal, and Hörmann (1969) for German adults, a number of pause and rate measures were significantly different for semantically ordinary or unusual passages. Comparisons among the four experiments manifested different patterns of pauses and rate across the two languages and age brackets.Support for the research reported here has come from two grants-in-aid of research from the Society of the Sigma Xi.