Abstract
The timing of turn taking in conversation is extremely rapid given the cognitive demands on speakers to comprehend, plan and execute turns in real time. Findings from psycholinguistics predict that the timing of turn taking is influenced by demands on processing, such as word frequency or syntactic complexity. An alternative view comes from the field of conversation analysis, which predicts that the rules of turn-taking and sequence organization may dictate the variation in gap durations (e.g., the functional role of each turn in communication). In this paper, we estimate the role of these two different kinds of factors in determining the speed of turn-taking in conversation. We use the Switchboard corpus of English telephone conversation, already richly annotated for syntactic structure speech act sequences, and segmental alignment. To this we add further information including Floor Transfer Offset (the amount of time between the end of one turn and the beginning of the next), word frequency, concreteness, and surprisal values. We then apply a novel statistical framework (“random forests”) to show that these two dimensions are interwoven together with indexical properties of the speakers as explanatory factors determining the speed of response. We conclude that an explanation of the of the timing of turn taking will require insights from both processing and sequence organization.
Highlights
Imagine a species that squawks at conspecifics
In our Switchboard data, the median for polar questions followed by a response was ms, and (Stivers et al, 2009) found that the median floor transfer offset (FTO) for polar questions followed by a response was ms
This suggests that the the relationship between measures of processing and FTO is complicated: overall tendencies are weak, but more dependable patterns can be found for certain types of transition
Summary
Imagine a species that squawks at conspecifics. If it only has one message type (signaling e.g., “Here I am”), messages will have low information value. If there is only one rule of use, namely “one at a time,” communication will exhibit turn-taking, but not much other sequential patterning. Marmoset communication perhaps come close to this (Takahashi et al, 2013). Human communication differs radically on both dimensions: there is immense complexity on the informational parameter as well as the sequential one (Levinson, 2013b). In this paper we explore how these two parameters conspire to explain the temporal properties of human communication
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