The role of intonation as a cue to turn taking in conversation

Abstract

The sociolinguistic literature concerning turn taking in conversation is extensive, but also limited in certain respects. Most studies have focused on kinesic behaviors and semantic/pragmatic devices for maintaining the flow of conversations, while few have investigated the role of prosody, especially in non-face-to-face turn taking. Moreover, most researchers describe the production of conversational behaviors rather than their perception by conversationalists. The present study attempts to fill these gaps through a series of listening tests incorporating both face-to-face (FF)and non-face-to-face (NFF) conversational excerpts, in order to discover how intonation is used as a perceptual cue for turn taking. Utterances isolated from these conversations were used to construct two test tapes; each set was also filtered so that the utterances were unintelligible but retained some prosodic information, notably intonation. Subjects then made turn beginning and turn end judgments for each item on the four resulting tapes. The findings show a great amount of variability in listener use of intonation as a cue to both FF and NFF speaker status, with rising fundamental frequency the strongest cue (to turn ends) in both conditions. The results also illustrate the highly interactive nature of prosody and other types of cues (e.g. syntactic and contextual information).