Reading between the turns: Social perceptions of turn-taking cues in conversation

Abstract

The perception of turn-taking cues provides an alluring new avenue for speech perception research since it requires complex cognitive and social processes that speakers must perform online during conversation. This study investigates whether inter-speaker gap duration, overlap, and backchanneling play a role in the social perception of speech during conversation. In a matched-guise task, participants heard clips of spontaneous, dyadic conversation. Clips were phonetically manipulated to control for the three turn-taking cues of interest by stretching and shrinking gap durations and replacing the naturally occurring backchanneling with silence. Participants then rated the speakers and conversations on a range of social measures, including dominance, formality, and similarity. Initial results indicate that listeners' social judgments are sensitive to these cues. For example, the removal of backchanneling in a male–male conversation resulted in ratings of higher speaker interest and lower speaker similarity, running contrary to some previous descriptions of backchannels as supportive signals (Yngve, 1970). This effect may interact with gender, such that backchanneling is interpreted differently in female-female or mixed-gender dyads, supporting Pearson etal.'s (2008) finding that turn-timing effects interact with (mis)matches in speaker race. It is clear these judgments follow from a complex interaction of subtle acoustic cues, social information, and context. [This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to M. Tice.]