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> > 
> > No pauses were avoided by having participants repeat every time they
> > produced a sentence with some sort of disfluency.
 
> I trust you kept track of the number of such repetitions.  I'm
> not sure what "sense" it makes to compare duration of utterances
> that were repeated several times with utterances that were
> produced only once.  Repetition must have a marked effect on
> duration, and could easily be confounded with your factors (e.g.,
> complex utterances being repeated more often).
 
You're right, there is a problem here. At the very best the repetition
effect causes noise in the data, but there might be some unfortunate
confounds. I chose to have subjects repeat sentences out of caution. The
non-natives were more likely to hesitate in one way or the other (insert
filled or unfilled pauses) than the natives. Since the hypothesis was
that non-natives would be slower than natives, giving the non-natives a
2nd chance to produce a fluent sentence would work against my
hypothesis.

But I had admittedly not considered the problem in terms of coplexity.
Thank you very much for bringing that up. Repeating probably works
against my hypothesis again here, so I err on the side of caution. But
your comment made it clear to me that I have to somehow find out what
repetition does for sentence duration.

Thanks,
Anders

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