Abstract
The anticipation of a speaker’s next turn is a key element of successful conversation. This can be achieved using a multitude of cues. In natural conversation, the most important cue for adults to anticipate the end of a turn (and therefore the beginning of the next turn) is the semantic and syntactic content. In addition, prosodic cues, such as intonation, or visual signals that occur before a speaker starts speaking (e.g., opening the mouth) help to identify the beginning and the end of a speaker’s turn. Early in life, prosodic cues seem to be more important than in adulthood. For example, it was previously shown that 3-year-old children anticipated more turns in observed conversations when intonation was available compared with when not, and this beneficial effect was present neither in younger children nor in adults (Keitel et al., 2013). In the present study, we investigated this effect in greater detail. Videos of conversations between puppets with either normal or flattened intonation were presented to children (1-year-olds and 3-year-olds) and adults. The use of puppets allowed the control of visual signals: the verbal signals (speech) started exactly at the same time as the visual signals (mouth opening). With respect to the children, our findings replicate the results of the previous study: 3-year-olds anticipated more turns with normal intonation than with flattened intonation, whereas 1-year-olds did not show this effect. In contrast to our previous findings, the adults showed the same intonation effect as the 3-year-olds. This suggests that adults’ cue use varies depending on the characteristics of a conversation. Our results further support the notion that the cues used to anticipate conversational turns differ in development.
Highlights
Smooth and successful everyday social interactions are to a large extent based on the individual’s ability to anticipate what an interaction partner is going to do
The present study was designed to explore the impact of two nonsymbolic cues on the identification of a speaker’s turn in greater detail, with a particular focus on the development of this cue use: the prosodic cue intonation and visual signals that are unrelated to linguistic content and form
We investigated the effect of the prosodic cue intonation in children and adults while controlling for visual cues
Summary
Smooth and successful everyday social interactions are to a large extent based on the individual’s ability to anticipate what an interaction partner is going to do next. When adults engage in a conversation, they identify turn transitions without great effort. They can use a variety of cues to do so: (1) the semantic content of a turn, or lexico-syntactic information, indicates that a response is required (content cues), (2) the spoken content is modulated by prosodic cues, such as intonation, to indicate a turn-boundary (prosodic cues), and (3) visual information peripherally accompanies speech, such as opening the mouth or gestures (visual cues). de Ruiter et al (2006) presented audio recordings of isolated turns from natural telephone conversations to adult participants, and asked them to indicate the anticipated end of the speaker’s turn. Adults accurately detect a turn boundary, they usually anticipate it if they can rely on the spoken content
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