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. (shrink)

Politeness in conversation is a fascinating aspect of human interaction that directly interfaces language use and human social behavior more generally. We show how game theory, as a higher-order theory of behavior, can provide the tools to understand and model polite behavior. The recently proposed responsibility exchange theory :313–344, 2019) describes how the polite communications of thanking and apologizing impact two different types of an agent’s social image: warmth and competence. Here, we extend this approach in several ways, most importantly (...) by adding a cultural-evolutionary dynamics that makes it possible to investigate the evolutionary stability of politeness strategies. Our analysis shows that in a society of agents who value status-related traits over reciprocity-related traits, both the less and the more polite strategies are maintained in cycles of cultural-evolutionary change. (shrink)

This work revisits the problem of breathing cues used for management of speaking turns in multiparty casual conversation. We propose a new categorisation of turn-taking events which combines the criterion of speaker change with whether the original speaker inhales before producing the next talkspurt. We demonstrate that the latter criterion provides a good proxy for pragmatic completeness of the previous utterance (and, by extension, of the interruptive character of the incoming speech). We also present evidence that breath holds are used (...) in reaction to incoming talk rather than as a turn-holding cue. In addition to analysing dimensions which are routinely omitted in studies of interactional functions of breathing (exhalations, presence of overlapping speech, breath holds), the present study also looks at patterns of breath holds in silent breathing and shows that breath holds are sometimes produced towards the beginning (and towards the top) of silent exhalations, potentially indicating an abandoned intention to take the turn. We claim that the breathing signal can thus be successfully used for uncovering \emph{hidden} turn-taking events, which are otherwise obscured by silence-based representations of interaction. (shrink)

In the present paper we address the old question of respiratory planning in speech production. We recast the problem in terms of speakers’ communicative goals and propose that speakers try to minimise respiratory effort in line with H&H theory. We analyze respiratory cycles coinciding with no speech (i.e. silence), short verbal feedback expressions (SFE’s) as well as longer vocalisations in terms of parameters of the respiratory cycle and find little evidence for respiratory planning in feedback production. We also investigate timing (...) of speech and SFEs in the exhalation and contrast it with nods. We find that while speech is strongly tied to the exhalation onset, SFEs are distributed much more uniformly throughout the exhalation and are often produced on residual air. Given that nods, which do not have any respiratory constraints, tend to be more frequent towards the end of an exhalation, we propose a mechanism whereby respiratory patterns are determined by the trade-off between speakers’ communicative goals and respiratory constraints. (shrink)

In spoken interactions, interlocutors carefully plan and time their utterances, minimising gaps and overlaps between consecutive turns. Cross-linguistic comparison has indicated that spoken languages vary only minimally in terms of turn-timing, and language acquisition research has shown pre-linguistic vocal turn-taking in the first half year of life. These observations suggest that the turn-taking system may provide a fundamental basis for our linguistic capacities. The question remains however to what extent our capacity for rapid turn-taking is determined by modality constraints. The (...) avoidance of overlapping turns could be motivated by the difficulty of hearing and speaking at the same time. If so, turn-taking in sign might show greater toleration for overlap. Alternatively, signed conversations may show a similar distribution of turn-timing as spoken languages, thus avoiding both gaps and overlaps. To address this question we look at turn-timing in question-answer sequences in spontaneous conversations of Sign Language of the Netherlands. The findings indicate that although there is considerable overlap in two or more signers' articulators in conversation, when proper allowance is made for onset preparation, post-utterance retraction and the intentional holding of signs for response, turn-taking latencies in sign look remarkably like those reported for spoken language. This is consistent with the possibility that, at least with regard to responses to questions, speakers and signers follow similar time courses in planning and producing their utterances in on-going conversation. This suggests that turn-taking systems may well be a shared cognitive infrastructure underlying all modern human languages, both spoken and signed. (shrink)

During face‐to‐face conversation, transitions between speaker turns are incredibly fast. These fast turn exchanges seem to involve next speakers predicting upcoming semantic information, such that next turn planning can begin before a current turn is complete. Given that face‐to‐face conversation also involves the use of communicative bodily signals, an important question is how bodily signals such as co‐speech hand gestures play into these processes of prediction and fast responding. In this corpus study, we found that hand gestures that depict or (...) refer to semantic information started before the corresponding information in speech, which held both for the onset of the gesture as a whole, as well as the onset of the stroke (the most meaningful part of the gesture). This early timing potentially allows listeners to use the gestural information to predict the corresponding semantic information to be conveyed in speech. Moreover, we provided further evidence that questions with gestures got faster responses than questions without gestures. However, we found no evidence for the idea that how much a gesture precedes its lexical affiliate (i.e., its predictive potential) relates to how fast responses were given. The findings presented here highlight the importance of the temporal relation between speech and gesture and help to illuminate the potential mechanisms underpinning multimodal language processing during face‐to‐face conversation. (shrink)