That's what I thought they meant, too, but it is not. From the research article (http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587.full http://www.pnas.org/content/106/2

That's what I thought they meant, too, but it is not. From the research article (http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587.full http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587.full): "The means display somewhat more variation, as shown in Fig. 2. Danish has the slowest response time on average (+469 ms) and Japanese has the fastest (+7 ms). The mean response offset for the full dataset is +208 ms, and the language-specific means fall within ≈250 ms either side of this cross-language mean, approximately the length of time it takes to produce a single English syllable (37)." The point, I think, is that these means are close compared to the tails: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587/F1.large.jpg http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587/F1.large.jpg