Long pauses can make speech difficult to understand, but short pauses can be highly beneficial, according to a recent study.

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg found that people tend to adapt their pauses to their conversation partner -- when the other person uses longer pauses they follow along and do the same thing, and vice versa.

"This way we learn what a normal pause is for the person we are talking to, in that particular conversation," researcher Kristina Lundholm Fors said in a statement.

For the study, Lundholm Fors and her colleagues used eye tracking to study the processing of sentences with long pauses, sentences containing pauses of typical duration and sentences without pauses. Her results show that sentences with unusually long pauses tend to be more difficult to process. The long pauses in her study were four seconds long.

"Four seconds doesn't sound like a long time, but when you are talking to somebody it can feel like an eternity. A typical pause in speech lasts only about a quarter to half a second," Lundholm Fors said.

Based on their findings, researchers concluded that long pauses can affect communication negatively, but they can also have a positive effect if they are not too long. After the eye tracking study, the test subjects were asked to indicate which sentences they had heard during the experiment. The sentences that contained a half second pause turned out to be significantly easier to understand than sentences that lacked pauses and sentences that contained an unusually long pause.

"This means that when we talk to other people, we pretty much know when there's going to be a pause, and this is information we can use as we prepare to say something," Lundholm Fors said.

Lundholm Fors' research shows that pauses in speech are not distributed randomly; instead, the use of them follows a distinct pattern.