When we ask other people to do us a favor, we apparently judge whether they’re being helpful or not by the pauses before they answer. That’s the finding from recent research from the University of Vienna, which shows how these pauses are rated differently depending on whether one is a native or non-native speaker.

The authors highlight that when people pause before responding to our request, we assume it reflects an unwillingness to help. The researchers played around 100 conversations to a group of Polish participants to explore whether being a native speaker affected that or not.

Willing to help

The conversations had pauses of either 0.2 or 1.2 seconds, with the responses provided by either native Polish speakers or Chinese people speaking Polish with a clear accent. The participants rated how willing they thought the respondents would be to the request made of them.

The results show that a longer pause before answering was interpreted as a lower willingness to help among native speakers, but this wasn’t the case for non-native speakers, where the pause was irrelevant.

“Our results suggest that listeners include in their judgments of others’ willingness to help how difficult speakers find it to express themselves. Thus, they do not see long pauses in non-native speakers as low willingness to help, but as a challenge for those speakers to formulate the answer in a foreign language. Therefore, they are more tolerant of longer pauses when they come from non-native speakers,” the researchers explain.

The researchers then examined how varying the length of pauses before responding to knowledge-based questions, such as the question about the first vegetable grown in space, affected interpretation. They found that longer pauses were perceived by both native and non-native speakers as a sign of lower knowledge and confidence in the accuracy of the answer.

“Knowledge questions have less social relevance than requests,” the researchers explain. “Knowledge questions can only be used to assess how competent someone is as a cooperation partner, but requests can be used to find out whether the person will actually cooperate.”

In subsequent studies, the scientists want to clarify whether this effect is independent of the languages spoken and now want to conduct tests with speakers of other languages and accents.