This is an interesting study but it has at least one incredulous assumption:
> Extraordinarily, we do not know how listeners actually assess how much is
spoken. Common sense tells us that someone who drawls a sentence slowly
is not considered to have said more than another person who gabbles the
same sentence twice in less time than the first person took to say it once.
That is, we normally make allowance for speaking rate in judging who says
most; amount of linguistic material produced is what really counts.
They do not analyze this issue at all in their paper and I don't see how they can just handwave it away with "common sense tells us". My common sense understanding is that our assessment of speech vs talking speed would be some kind of curve, with the extreme ends ending up with underestimation(spoke too fast, could not remember all the words said; spoke too slow, lost track of conversation) and the rest trending as slower -> overestimated and faster -> underestimated. But we both only have our "common sense" to put forward for this conjecture. Either way, it would have helped if they measured the talking speed of the speakers, so we could at least see if there was any statistical difference.
> Extraordinarily, we do not know how listeners actually assess how much is spoken. Common sense tells us that someone who drawls a sentence slowly is not considered to have said more than another person who gabbles the same sentence twice in less time than the first person took to say it once. That is, we normally make allowance for speaking rate in judging who says most; amount of linguistic material produced is what really counts.
They do not analyze this issue at all in their paper and I don't see how they can just handwave it away with "common sense tells us". My common sense understanding is that our assessment of speech vs talking speed would be some kind of curve, with the extreme ends ending up with underestimation(spoke too fast, could not remember all the words said; spoke too slow, lost track of conversation) and the rest trending as slower -> overestimated and faster -> underestimated. But we both only have our "common sense" to put forward for this conjecture. Either way, it would have helped if they measured the talking speed of the speakers, so we could at least see if there was any statistical difference.