Mind the gap: Electromagnetic articulometer observation of speech articulation in conversational turn-taking

Abstract

Joe Perkell pioneered the use of electromagnetic articulometry (EMA) for the observation and quantification of the kinematics of speech articulator movements. In the spirit of his research, we have extended these methods to EMA observation of two facing speakers interacting in conversation. The gaps or pauses between turns in speaking are known from acoustic measurement to be relatively short in duration, about 200 ms or the length of a syllable on average, and this gap duration has been shown to be consistent across widely diverse languages and cultures (Stivers et al., 2009). However, because the cognitive latencies for producing a response are much longer than this interval its planning must occur during the incoming turn. Here we provide evidence for this planning from articulator movements that anticipate speech. Movements of sensors attached to the tongue, jaw and lips have been tracked for each of 12 speaker pairs. Gaps are measured as the difference between the acoustic end of one speaker's turn t...