The structure of silence between turns in two‐party conversation

Abstract

Turn taking is a fundamental structural feature of social interaction. Three major approaches to describing turn taking have emerged: stochastic, signaling, and sequential‐production models. The first two treat silences between speakers as simple response latencies, whereas the third views silence as generated collaboratively by the parties to the conversation. The simple response‐latency interpretation predicts a distribution of be‐tween‐turn silences that declines monotonically with duration, whereas the sequential‐production model predicts a periodic pattern of peaks and valleys, with an overall decline in the heights of the peaks as duration increases. Analysis of the frequency distributions of durations of silences between speakers in two‐party conversations finds the periodic structure predicted by the sequential‐production model. The finding is interpreted as supporting a view of social interaction as a fundamentally collaborative activity.