Speaking and writing: Comparisons of two psycholinguistic siblings

Abstract

An identical composition and recall task was used to compare writing and speaking in terms of their temporal organization. A common cutoff point of 0.1 sec was used for minimum duration of pauses. Speakers took only a fourth of the time taken by writers, but spoke more than half again as many syllables as writers wrote. Mean durations of pauses for writing and speaking were equivalent (110 and 0.97 sec, respectively), but the respective distributions of pauses differed dramatically: In writing, a far greater number of pauses per syllable led to shorter phrases (segmentation between and even within individual words), whereas speaking was characterized by fewer pauses per syllable and consequently longer phrases (segmentation between syntactic units). Pauses at syntactic positions (i.e., after punctuation) were the least frequent pauses in writing, although they were the longest in mean duration.