A cross-cultural approach to cognitive state attribution based on inter-turn speech pauses

Abstract This study explores how inter-turn speech pauses influence the perception of cognitive states such as knowledge, confidence, and willingness to grant requests in conversational settings. Longer pauses are typically associated with lower competence and willingness, but Matzinger et al. (2023) discovered that this attribution varies when non-native speakers are involved. They found that listeners were more tolerant of long pauses from non-native than from native speakers when assessing their willingness to grant requests. This may result from the fact that listeners may attribute long pauses to the additional cognitive load non-native speakers face during cognitive processing and response formulation in a second language. This tolerance towards long pauses by non-native speakers did not extend to judgments about non-native speakers’ knowledge and confidence — potentially because knowledge questions are less socially engaging than requests. Here, we replicated and extended Matzinger et al.’s (2023) experiment, which focussed on speakers of Polish, to a cross-cultural context with speakers of Chinese. Our results confirmed that non-native accent mediates perceptions of willingness, but not knowledge or confidence. These findings suggest that inter-turn speech pauses play a nuanced role in cognitive state attribution of native and non-native speakers and that cultural factors minimally influence these perceptions. This may indicate that the mechanisms involved are rooted in evolutionarily fundamental aspects of human social communication and cognition.