Judgments concerning the valence of inter-turn silence across speakers of American English, Italian, and Japanese

Lengthen the gap and listeners think you are less willing --- in all three language groups tested, and by a different amount in each.

Roberts, F., Margutti, P. & Takano, S. (2011). Judgments concerning the valence of inter-turn silence across speakers of American English, Italian, and Japanese. Discourse Processes, 48(5), 331–354.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2011.558002

Checked

Against the abstract, 16 September 2026

Why it is on the list

Where Kendrick and Torreira observed that long gaps tend to come before rejections, this study manipulated the gap and measured what listeners concluded from it. Silences of 0, 600 and 1200 ms were crossed with two speech-act types in telephone conversations modelled on a real call between friends, and native speakers of American English, Italian and Japanese rated the speaker’s willingness to comply or agree, in their home countries. Ratings fell significantly at longer silences within every language group — so reading a pause as reluctance is not one language’s habit. The group means also differed significantly, which qualifies week 4’s timeout model: the inference is general, but the expectation it is measured against is local. A listener’s timeout is a learned setting, and it gets applied to people who never shared the setting.