Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language.

Stephen C Levinson,Francisco Torreira

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00731

Abstract

The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns at talking. This paper reviews the extensive literature about this system, adding new statistical analyses of behavioral data where they have been missing, demonstrating that turn-taking has the systematic properties originally noted by Sacks et al. (1974; hereafter SSJ). This system poses some significant puzzles for current theories of language processing: the gaps between turns are short (of the order of 200 ms), but the latencies involved in language production are much longer (over 600 ms). This seems to imply that participants in conversation must predict (or ‘project’ as SSJ have it) the end of the current speaker’s turn in order to prepare their response in advance. This in turn implies some overlap between production and comprehension despite their use of common processing resources. Collecting together what is known behaviorally and experimentally about the system, the space for systematic explanations of language processing for conversation can be significantly narrowed, and we sketch some first model of the mental processes involved for the participant preparing to speak next.

Highlights

Why Turn-Taking in Conversation is Important for the Psychology of Language
We analyzed a subset of 348 conversations that were free of timing errors, and with annotations included in the NXT-Switchboard Corpus release (Calhoun et al, 2010)
With regard to how common overlaps are in terms of proportion of turn-transitions, Figure 2 shows the distribution of the duration of gaps and between-overlaps combined together as floor transfer offset’ (FTO)

Summary

Introduction

Why Turn-Taking in Conversation is Important for the Psychology of LanguageOne of the most distinctive ethological properties of humans is that they spend considerable hours in the day in a close (often face-to-face) position with others, exchanging short bursts of sound in a human-specific communication pattern: extrapolating from Mehl et al (2007), we may each produce about 1200 of these bursts a day, for a total of 2–3 h of speech. At the end of such bursts, a speaker stops, and another takes a turn This is the prime ecological niche for language, the context in which language is learned (see Section 6.1 below), in which the cultural forms of language have evolved, and where the bulk of language usage happens. This core form of language use poses a central puzzle for psycholinguistics (see Section 6), which has largely ignored this context, instead examining details of the processes of language production or comprehension separately in laboratory contexts. Decades of experimentation have shown that the language production system has latencies of around 600 ms and up for encoding a new word (reviewed in Section 6.3) but the gaps between turns average

Methods

Results

Conclusion