Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation
Stivers, Enfield, Brown, Englert, Hayashi, Heinemann, Hoymann, Rossano, de Ruiter, Yoon and Levinson, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(26), 2009, 10587-10592. Comparison of turn-taking across 10 languages, from small traditional communities to major world languages. All avoided overlapping talk and minimised silence between turns. Average gaps between turns differed across languages, but only within about 250 milliseconds of the cross-language mean. The authors suggest sensitivity to small tempo differences may make them seem large, and conclude the infrastructure is shared with quantitative local variation.
Stivers, Enfield, Brown, Englert, Hayashi, Heinemann, Hoymann, Rossano, de Ruiter, Yoon and Levinson, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(26), 2009, 10587-10592. Comparison of turn-taking across 10 languages, from small traditional communities to major world languages. All avoided overlapping talk and minimised silence between turns. Average gaps between turns differed across languages, but only within about 250 milliseconds of the cross-language mean. The authors suggest sensitivity to small tempo differences may make them seem large, and conclude the infrastructure is shared with quantitative local variation.
Written from the abstract.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., Hoymann, G., Rossano, F., de Ruiter, J. P., Yoon, K.-E., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(26), 10587-10592. doi:10.1073/pnas.0903616106 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0903616106