Abstract
In everyday conversation, turns often follow each other immediately or overlap in time. It has been proposed that speakers achieve this tight temporal coordination between their turns by engaging in linguistic dual-tasking, i.e., by beginning to plan their utterance during the preceding turn. This raises the question of how speakers manage to co-ordinate speech planning and listening with each other. Experimental work addressing this issue has mostly concerned the capacity demands and interference arising when speakers retrieve some content words while listening to others. However, many contributions to conversations are not content words, but backchannels, such as “hm”. Backchannels do not provide much conceptual content and are therefore easy to plan and respond to. To estimate how much they might facilitate speech planning in conversation, we determined their frequency in a Dutch and a German corpus of conversational speech. We found that 19% of the contributions in the Dutch corpus, and 16% of contributions in the German corpus were backchannels. In addition, many turns began with fillers or particles, most often translation equivalents of “yes” or “no,” which are likewise easy to plan. We proposed that to generate comprehensive models of using language in conversation psycholinguists should study not only the generation and processing of content words, as is commonly done, but also consider backchannels, fillers, and particles.
Highlights
Everyday conversation consists of turns delivered by two or more speakers
Levinson and Torreira (2015) proposed that swift turn taking in conversation resulted from linguistic dualtasking: The interlocutors listen to each other and simultaneously prepare their own utterances such that by the end of one speaker’s turn, the speaker is ready to speak
Given the average gap durations of 300 ms or less, which have been consistently reported across corpora (e.g., Stivers et al, 2009; Heldner and Edlund, 2010; Roberts et al, 2015), utterance preparation before the end of the preceding turn appears to be necessary
Summary
Everyday conversation consists of turns delivered by two or more speakers. The aim of the present article is to contribute to our understanding of the remarkable efficiency of the turn-taking system. We make a methodological point: To understand how conversation works, psycholinguists need to consider both the timing of turns and their content. They need to study the production and comprehension of nouns and verbs, and that of “little words,” especially backchannels. This may be an obvious point, but it has, in our opinion, not received sufficient attention in the field
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