Single pause duration

To further investigate the variable pause duration, single pause duration was considered as well. The table below displays the average single pause duration for paparps and npaparps, regardless of the participants' level of experience.

Average single pause duration

Table 18. Average single pause duration: paparp vs npaparp

Students take on average longer (single) pauses when translating npaparps as compared to paparps. Remarkably, this is true for both sentences and clauses, which was not the case for any of the other three dependent variables. Moreover, the discrepancy between the two grammatical structures (paparp/npaparp) is larger at clause level (0.419 s) than at sentence level (0.270 s). However, statistical testing revealed that these differences are not significant (p > 0.167).

Table 19. Average single pause duration: trained vs untrained students

Comparing the two groups of students, the trained students show a significantly longer single pause duration than the untrained students in both sentences and clauses (p < 0.001). They paused on average 0.717 seconds longer in sentences and 0.824 seconds in clauses. The standard deviation is noticeably higher at clause level than at sentence level, which indicates that the results were more spread at clause level.

Trained students

sentence clause

paparp 3.556 3.929

npaparp 3.871 4.280

Untrained students

sentence clause

paparp 2.883 3.031

npaparp 3.108 3.524

Table 20. Average single pause duration, including all three independent variables

When all three independent variables are included into the analysis, it is found that all students paused longer when translating an npaparp as opposed to a paparp. In contrast to what was found for translation time, number of pauses and total pause duration, this discrepancy is observed in both sentences and clauses.

Another remarkable finding is that single pause durations are longer for clauses than for sentences. As the sentence unit is longer, it would be expected that pauses are longer at that level. Nonetheless, this finding may just point to the fact that students usually process a text in smaller chunks, irrespective of how much context is provided. Another explanation may be that most critical/control clauses were situated at the beginning of the critical/control sentence, which is the place where most students usually paused a little bit longer.

Within the trained group, the difference between paparp and npaparp single pause duration measures 0.315 seconds at sentence level and 0.351 seconds at clause level. Within the untrained group, the discrepancy is notably higher for clauses (0.493 s) as compared to sentences (0.225 s). In general, trained students paused on average longer than untrained students, regardless of the sentence/clause and paparp/npaparp conditions.

To investigate whether these findings could possibly be extended to the entire population of students, the Mann-Whitney U test was applied to the data sets of both student groups to test statistical significance. With p-values between 0.159 and 0.584, no significance was reached, neither at sentence level, nor at clause level. Thus, any differences observed in the sample are not significant and the null hypothesis, which states that there exists no difference between the single pause durations for paparps and npaparps, cannot be rejected.

TRAINED UNTRAINED

Table 21. Average single pause duration sentence per paragraph: trained vs untrained students When the average single pause durations per paragraph are considered, the same general trend can be observed as was seen for the other variables: trained students paused, on average, longer than untrained students, which suggests the former translated slower.

Table 21 shows that the trained and untrained students have only two paragraphs in common, nos. 21 and 28. Again, it is remarkable that the highest single pause duration in the trained group, which stands out of the rest with an average of 5.101 seconds, is not even in the top five for untrained students. This average was increased by an outlier (7.713 s), but analysis of all individual pause times for this sentence showed that four out of the five pause durations of the trained group exceeded 4 seconds, whereas this was the case for only two out of the six pause durations obtained from the untrained group. This could suggest that the trained students identified more translation problems in that sentence compared to the other students or that not all untrained students identified the npaparp as a translation problem and therefore translated it literally.

The top five of highest single pause durations in the trained group mainly consists of npaparp sentences, which would be expected since npaparps are considered more challenging. In the

untrained group, on the other hand, three out of the five highest single pause durations belong

Table 22. Average single pause duration clause per paragraph: trained vs untrained students

At clause level, trained and untrained students have four paragraphs in common, three of which are in the top five of highest single pause durations. These are all npaparp paragraphs.

Moreover, remarkably, the top three of highest pause durations are dedicated to npaparps in both groups. In fact, almost all clauses with the highest single pause durations are npaparp clauses. Inversely, almost all clauses with the lowest single pause durations are paparp clauses.

As one may observe in Table 22, there are some figures that stand out (e.g. paragraph 4 with 6.616 s and paragraph 18 with 6.396 s). However, these values seemed highly influenced by severe within-group differences and will therefore not be discussed.