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Interspeech 2018
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5 pages
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Turn-taking behavior in conversation is reported to be universal among cultures, although the language-specific means used to accomplish smooth turn-taking are likely to differ. Previous studies investigating turn-taking have primarily focused on languages which are already heavily-studied. The current work investigates the timing of turn-taking in question-response sequences in naturalistic conversations in Ruuli, an under-studied Bantu language spoken in Uganda. We extracted sequences involving wh-questions and polar questions, and measured the duration of the gap or overlap between questions and their following responses, additionally differentiating between different response types such as affirmative (i.e. type-conforming) or negative (i.e. non-type-conforming) responses to polar questions. We find that the timing of responses to various question types in Ruuli is consistent with timings that have been reported for a variety of other languages, with a mean gap duration between questions and responses of around 259 ms. Our findings thus emphasize the universal nature of turn-taking behavior in human interaction, despite Ruuli's substantial structural differences from languages in which turn-taking has been previously studied.
Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 2009
Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations.
That speakers take turns in interaction is a fundamental fact across languages and speaker communities. How this taking of turns is organised is less clearly established. We have looked at interactions recorded in the field using the same task, in a set of three genetically and regionally diverse languages: Georgian, Cabécar, and Fongbe. As in previous studies, we find evidence for avoidance of gaps and overlaps in floor transitions in all languages, but also find contrasting differences between them on these features. Further, we observe that interlocutors align on these temporal features in all three languages. (We show this by correlating speaker averages of temporal features, which has been done before, and further ground it by ruling out potential alternative explanations, which is novel and a minor methodological contribution.) The universality of smooth turn-taking and alignment despite potentially relevant grammatical differences suggests that the different resources that each of these languages make available are nevertheless used to achieve the same effects. This finding has potential consequences both from a theoretical point of view as well as for modeling such phenomena in conversational agents.
2015
The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns at talking. This paper reviews the extensive literature about this system, adding new statistical analyses of behavioral data where they have been missing, demonstrating that turn-taking has the systematic properties originally noted by Sacks et al. (1974; hereafter SSJ). This system poses some significant puzzles for current theories of language processing: the gaps between turns are short (of the order of 200 ms), but the latencies involved in language production are much longer (over 600 ms). This seems to imply that participants in conversation must predict (or 'project' as SSJ have it) the end of the current speaker's turn in order to prepare their response in advance. This in turn implies some overlap between production and comprehension despite their use of common processing resources. Collecting together what is known behaviorally and experimentally about the system, the space for systematic explanations of language processing for conversation can be significantly narrowed, and we sketch some first model of the mental processes involved for the participant preparing to speak next. Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278036944_Timing_in_turn-taking_and_its_implications_for_processing_models_of_language [accessed Jun 12, 2015].
Journal of Pragmatics, 2010
Questions have played a central role in thought about language. In the philosophy of language, the contrast with declaratives has been a lever with which to examine theories of the match between language and the world, a way of exploring presupposition and information structure, and a route into the theory of speech acts. In anthropology, the special social role of questions has long been noted, on the one hand displaying the ignorance appropriate to lower status, on the other hand the power of coercion . In grammar, interrogatives are often marked sentence types, and the operations converting declaratives to interrogatives have proved to be an enlightening window on the underlying syntactic machinery of language in general. Questions have also been held to be a crucial locus where intonation, grammar and function coalesce. In pragmatics, the tie between question and answer has been a prototype for larger units in the structure of verbal interaction, and specifically in the theory of adjacency pairs.
IJSR, Vol (3), No (10), October 2024, 2024
Early work in conversation analysis focused primarily on English conversations. During the past 20 years, conversation analysts started to investigate informal verbal interaction within communities with a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Sidnell, 2007). Although comparative studies have examined a wide range of languages, there seems to be no emphasis on Arabic conversations. This study aims to explore whether there are differences between informal Arabic and English conversations turn-taking system. Six participants, three native Arabic speakers and three native speakers of English, took place in this study. Data were collected through audio recording; seventeen minutes for Arabic conversations and 20 minutes for the English conversation. The study revealed that there were no major differences between Arabic and English informal conversations in terms of the turn-taking system. While English speakers used more filling words such as “mm”, “yeh”, and “so” to keep the conversation going, both Arabic and English speakers aimed to minimize the gap and overlap. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of cross-cultural interactions and offer implications for language teaching and learning.
2004
On the basis of two-speaker spontaneous conversations, it is shown that the distributions of both pauses and speech-overlaps of telephone and face-to-face dialogues have different statistical properties. Pauses in a face-to-face dialogue last up to 4 times longer than pauses in telephone conversations in functionally comparable conditions. There is a high correlation (0.88 or larger) between the average pause duration for the two speakers across face-to-face dialogues and telephone dialogues. The data provided form a first quantitative analysis of the complex turn-taking mechanism evidenced in the dialogues available in the 9-million-word Spoken Dutch Corpus.
In this paper, we present the outline of a new model of turn-taking that is applicable not only to smooth transitions but also to transitions involving overlapping speech. We identify acous-tic, prosodic, and syntactic cues in overlapped utterances that elicit early initiation of a next turn, based on a quantitative anal-ysis of Japanese three-party conversations, proposing a model for predicting a turn's completion in an incremental fashion us-ing sources from units at multiple levels.
This study aims to describe temporal characteristics of pausing and turn-taking phenomena in conversation. The material comes from the VASST corpus of contemporary Czech and uses four spontaneous dialogues in the form of an informal interview. We describe both general and idiosyncratic effects found in our data and compare them with results from other languages. In our material, transitions with a silent gap, overlaps and back-channels all display notably similar temporal distributions with the median around 360 ms and a marked skewing. The four dialogues did not differ in the proportion of turns belonging to the interviewer (58 %) vs. interviewee (42 %), which is hypothesized to characterize the experimental task. Despite a number of general tendencies, individual differences in pausing and turn-taking behaviour of the speakers were found as well. For instance, the ratio of pauses and gap transitions proved to be highly dialoguespecific. We also gathered evidence for a substantial change in the speech behaviour of the interviewer resulting from a change of her communication partner.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2011
2005
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