Brief silences are perceptually longer than their physical duration.

Evidence

The physical duration of test sounds interpreted as durations of silence by subjects match well when the duration is near 1 s. The difference between the values, however, increases with a shortening test sound, with durations less than 100 ms being perceived as much longer than the length of the physical test signal (Fastl and Zwicker, 2007, Chapter 10). It is clear that this phenomenon has an effect on the perception of speech and music. For example, short silences existing in speech are hard to perceive, at least partly due to this effect. It is also clear that the longer perceptual duration of the burst tone relative to silence is related to the time-masking phenomenon. The silence immediately after the burst is masked, as shown in Figure 10.18, which makes the silence appear shorter than it actually is. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1191

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s curated note in “Troubling Transparency” era: time-masking causing short silences in speech to be misperceived connects to the soundscape literature where silence duration perception underpins pause/beat work in Deep Listening and The Soundscape.
• ADDENDUM: The claim that silence duration is systematically distorted by masking has resonance with One Square Inch of Silence and the silence-value theme threading the reader’s soundscape work.
• QUESTION: How much of the difficulty perceiving short speech pauses is masking vs. the perceptual length-inflation shown separately for bursts? Wants pinning down.