Generalizability of pause times in sentence production to distinguish between adult writers

Researchers often decide on the number of trials included in an experiment without adhering to an empirical method or framework. This might compromise generalizability and unnecessarily increase participant burden. In this article we want to put forward generalizability theory as a guide for task reduction. We will use a sentence production task to demonstrate how a generalizability and a decision study can help researchers to estimate the minimum number of trials and of items per trial that are necessary to generalize over trials. We obtained writing process data for 116 participants. Each of them completed a sentence production task that had 40 trials. Pause times between and within all words, target nouns and target verbs were logged with the keystroke logging tool ScriptLog. Results demonstrate that generalizability theory can serve as an empirical framework to ensure generalizable measurements on the one hand, and reduce participant burden to a minimum on the other. This finding is particularly valuable for studies with vulnerable target groups, such as participants suffering from aphasia, dyslexia or Alzheimer's disease.