Examining how cognitive demands and complexity in comparable L1 and L2 communicative tasks affect prosody in general, and interactional pausing behavior in particular, offers a fruitful testing ground for predictions of speech production models and may also yield useful pedagogical implications. Twelve pairs of undergraduates played a collaborative game of giving directions structured into three levels of gradually rising complexity in both their native Slovak and non-native English. All silent and filled pauses were identified and information of their distributions, durations, and co-occurrences was extracted. The results suggest minimal effects of complexity, or its interaction with language, on pausing behavior. This is in line with the Levelt´s (1989) speech production model, in which higher complexity levels place greater pressure on the conceptualization stage of speech production, which differs only slightly between L1 and L2 speech production.