Turn-taking in human communicative interaction

Holler, Judith; Casillas, Marisa; H. Kendrick, Kobin; C. Levinson, Stephen

2016

Frontiers Media SA

The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields.

Society & social sciences; Psychology; Cognition & cognitive psychology

English

9782889198252

10.3389/978-2-88919-825-2

Syntax Warning: Invalid Font Weight
TURN-TAKING IN HUMAN
COMMUNICATIVE
INTERACTION
EDITED BY : Judith Holler, Kobin H. Kendrick, Marisa Casillas
and Stephen C. Levinson
PUBLISHED IN : Frontiers in Psychology

Frontiers Copyright Statement
© Copyright 2007-2016 Frontiers
Media SA. All rights reserved.
All content included on this site,
such as text, graphics, logos, button
icons, images, video/audio clips,
downloads, data compilations and
software, is the property of or is
licensed to Frontiers Media SA
(“Frontiers”) or its licensees and/or
subcontractors. The copyright in the
text of individual articles is the property
of their respective authors, subject to
a license granted to Frontiers.

About Frontiers
Frontiers is more than just an open-access publisher of scholarly articles: it is a pioneering
approach to the world of academia, radically improving the way scholarly research
is managed. The grand vision of Frontiers is a world where all people have an equal
opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge. Frontiers provides immediate and
permanent online open access to all its publications, but this alone is not enough to
realize our grand goals.

Frontiers Journal Series

The compilation of articles constituting
this e-book, wherever published,
as well as the compilation of all other
content on this site, is the exclusive
property of Frontiers. For the
conditions for downloading and
copying of e-books from Frontiers’
website, please see the Terms for
Website Use. If purchasing Frontiers
e-books from other websites
or sources, the conditions of the
website concerned apply.

The Frontiers Journal Series is a multi-tier and interdisciplinary set of open-access, online
journals, promising a paradigm shift from the current review, selection and dissemination
processes in academic publishing. All Frontiers journals are driven by researchers for
researchers; therefore, they constitute a service to the scholarly community. At the same
time, the Frontiers Journal Series operates on a revolutionary invention, the tiered publishing
system, initially addressing specific communities of scholars, and gradually climbing up to
broader public understanding, thus serving the interests of the lay society, too.

Images and graphics not forming part
of user-contributed materials may
not be downloaded or copied
without permission.

Dedication to Quality

Individual articles may be downloaded
and reproduced in accordance
with the principles of the CC-BY
licence subject to any copyright or
other notices. They may not be
re-sold as an e-book.
As author or other contributor you
grant a CC-BY licence to others to
reproduce your articles, including any
graphics and third-party materials
supplied by you, in accordance with
the Conditions for Website Use and
subject to any copyright notices which
you include in connection with your
articles and materials.
All copyright, and all rights therein,
are protected by national and
international copyright laws.
The above represents a summary
only. For the full conditions see the
Conditions for Authors and the
Conditions for Website Use.
ISSN 1664-8714
ISBN 978-2-88919-825-2
DOI 10.3389/978-2-88919-825-2

Frontiers in Psychology

Each Frontiers article is a landmark of the highest quality, thanks to genuinely collaborative
interactions between authors and review editors, who include some of the world’s best
academicians. Research must be certified by peers before entering a stream of knowledge
that may eventually reach the public - and shape society; therefore, Frontiers only applies
the most rigorous and unbiased reviews.
Frontiers revolutionizes research publishing by freely delivering the most outstanding
research, evaluated with no bias from both the academic and social point of view.
By applying the most advanced information technologies, Frontiers is catapulting scholarly
publishing into a new generation.

What are Frontiers Research Topics?
Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series:
they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their
unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers
Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical
advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers
Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial
Office: researchtopics@frontiersin.org

1

April 2016  |  Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Iinteraction

TURN-TAKING IN HUMAN
COMMUNICATIVE
INTERACTION
Topic Editors:
Judith Holler, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Kobin H. Kendrick, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Marisa Casillas, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Stephen C. Levinson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands

Cover image: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, traffic
lights for cyclists.
Image used under license from Shutterstock.com

The core use of language is in face-to-face
conversation. This is characterized by rapid
turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number
central puzzles for the psychology of language.
Consider, for example, that in large corpora
the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to
300 ms, but the latencies involved in language
production require minimally between 600 ms
(for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple
sentence). This implies that participants in
conversation are predicting the ends of the
incoming turn and preparing in advance. But
how is this done? What aspects of this prediction
are done when? What happens when the
prediction is wrong? What stops participants
coming in too early? If the system is running
on prediction, why is there consistently a mode
of 100 to 300 ms in response time?

The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it
seems that comprehension must run parallel
with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive
limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome?
Far from being ‘easy’ as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the
most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how
do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in
this domain?
Research shows that aspects of turn-taking, such as its timing, are remarkably stable across
languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does

Frontiers in Psychology

2

April 2016  |  Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Iinteraction

prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause)
is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb
at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when
one changes modality, as in sign languages – with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking
much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals – do
gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic
question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird
species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this
among the great apes.
All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and
of the language sciences. This Research Topic contributes to advancing our understanding of
these problems by summarizing recent work from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists,
students of dialog and conversation analysis, linguists, phoneticians, and comparative ethologists.
Citation: Holler, J., Kendrick, K, H., Casillas, M., Levinson, S. C., eds. (2016). Turn-Taking in
Human Communicative Interaction. Lausanne: Frontiers Media.
doi: 10.3389/978-2-88919-825-2

Frontiers in Psychology

3

April 2016  |  Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Iinteraction

Table of Contents

06

Editorial: Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction
Judith Holler, Kobin H. Kendrick, Marisa Casillas and Stephen C. Levinson

1. Foundations of turn-taking
10
27
39

60

Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language
Stephen C. Levinson and Francisco Torreira
The use of content and timing to predict turn transitions
Simon Garrod and Martin J. Pickering
Social coordination in animal vocal interactions. Is there any evidence of
turn-taking? The starling as an animal model
Laurence Henry, Adrian J. F. K. Craig, Alban Lemasson and Martine Hausberger
Corrigendum: Social coordination in animal vocal interactions. Is there any
evidence of turn-taking? The starling as an animal model
Laurence Henry, Adrian J. F. K. Craig, Alban Lemasson and Martine Hausberger

2. Signals and mechanisms for prediction and timing
62

Anticipation in turn-taking: mechanisms and information sources
Carina Riest, Annett B. Jorschick and Jan P. de Ruiter
76 Unaddressed participants’ gaze in multi-person interaction: optimizing
recipiency
Judith Holler and Kobin H. Kendrick
90 Action-projection in Japanese conversation: topic particles WA, MO, and TTE
for triggering categorization activities
Hiroko Tanaka
113 Word-by-word entrainment of speech rhythm during joint story building
Tommi Himberg, Lotta Hirvenkari, Anne Mandel and Riitta Hari

3. Planning next turns in conversation
119 The effects of processing and sequence organization on the timing of turn
taking: a corpus study
Seán G. Roberts, Francisco Torreira and Stephen C. Levinson
135 Breathing for answering: the time course of response planning in conversation
Francisco Torreira, Sara Bögels and Stephen C. Levinson

4. Effects of context and function on timing
146 The intersection of turn-taking and repair: the timing of other-initiations of
repair in conversation
Kobin H. Kendrick

Frontiers in Psychology

4

April 2016  |  Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Iinteraction

162 Expanded transition spaces: the case of Garrwa
Rod Gardner and Ilana Mushin
176 Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking
Melisa Stevanovic and Anssi Peräkylä

5. Turn-taking in signed languages
183 Turn-timing in signed conversations: coordinating stroke-to-stroke turn
boundaries
Connie de Vos, Francisco Torreira and Stephen C. Levinson
196 The management of turn transition in signed interaction through the lens of
overlaps
Simone Girard-Groeber
215 Suspending the next turn as a form of repair initiation: evidence from Argentine
Sign Language
Elizabeth Manrique and N. J. Enfield

6. Development of turn-taking skills
236 Early development of turn-taking in vocal interaction between mothers and
infants
Maya Gratier, Emmanuel Devouche, Bahia Guellai, Rubia Infanti, Ebru Yilmaz
and Erika Parlato-Oliveira
246 Early developmental changes in the timing of turn-taking: a longitudinal study
of mother–infant interaction
Elma E. Hilbrink, Merideth Gattis and Stephen C. Levinson
258 Turn-taking: a case study of early gesture and word use in answering WHERE
and WHICH questions
Eve V. Clark and Kate L. Lindsey
265 The use of intonation for turn anticipation in observed conversations without
visual signals as source of information
Anne Keitel and Moritz M. Daum
274 Dutch and English toddlers’ use of linguistic cues in predicting upcoming turn
transitions
Imme Lammertink, Marisa Casillas, Titia Benders, Brechtje Post and Paula Fikkert

Frontiers in Psychology

5

April 2016  |  Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Iinteraction

EDITORIAL
published: 21 December 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01919

Editorial: Turn-Taking in Human
Communicative Interaction
Judith Holler *, Kobin H. Kendrick, Marisa Casillas and Stephen C. Levinson
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Keywords: turn-taking, turn-timing, turn transitions, conversation, social interaction, language processing,
prediction, projection

The Editorial on the research topic
Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Edited and reviewed by:
Manuel Carreiras,
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain
and Language, Spain
*Correspondence:
Judith Holler
judith.holler@mpi.nl
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 26 November 2015
Accepted: 30 November 2015
Published: 21 December 2015
Citation:
Holler J, Kendrick KH, Casillas M and
Levinson SC (2015) Editorial:
Turn-Taking in Human Communicative
Interaction. Front. Psychol. 6:1919.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01919

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

One intriguing feature of the human communication system is the interactional infrastructure it
builds on. In both dyadic and multi-person interactions, conversation is highly structured and
organized according to set principles (Sacks et al., 1974). Human adult interaction is characterized
by a mechanism of exchange based on alternating (and relatively short) bursts of information.
In the majority of cases, only one person tends to speak at a time and each contribution usually
receives a response. What is remarkable is the precise timing of these sequential contributions,
resulting in gaps between speaking turns averaging around just 200 ms (Stivers et al., 2009). From
psycholinguistic experiments, we know that the time it takes to produce even simple one-wordutterances (min. 600 ms, Indefrey and Levelt, 2004) by far exceeds this average gap duration, hinting
at the complexity of the cognitive processes that must be involved (Levinson, 2013).
While the behavioral principles governing turn-taking in interaction have been researched for
some decades—primarily by scholars of conversation analysis—the cognitive underpinnings of the
human turn-taking system have long remained elusive. Recently, psycholinguists have begun to
explore the cognitive and neural processes that allow us to deal effectively with the immensely
complex task of taking turns on time. Amongst other things, this has highlighted the anticipatory,
predictive processes that must be at work, as well as the different layers of processing allowing
production planning and comprehension to take place simultaneously (de Ruiter et al., 2006;
Magyari and de Ruiter; Bögels et al., 2015). These insights mesh well with the conversation
analytic literature that has illuminated the interactional environments in which individual turns are
embedded: their sequential organization and the use of conventionalized linguistic constructions
allow for the projection of upcoming talk, as well as for the recognition of points of possible
completions in the turn which make transition to the next speaker relevant (Sacks et al., 1974; Ford
and Thompson, 1996; Schegloff, 2007). The articles in this Research Topic bring together these
as yet largely independent lines of research to elucidate our understanding of turn-taking from
multiple perspectives and aim to foster future synergies.
In addition to exploring the adult psycholinguistic machinery and its workings, researchers have
begun to wonder how and when the required cognitive and social processes mature in children, as
well as how they compare to those in other species. Levinson (2006) proposed that human beings
are inherently social and interactive in orientation. He argues that an “interaction engine” may lie at
the heart of children’s early predisposition for turn-taking. Likewise, this particular human capacity
might explain the strong cultural universals in the structure of human interaction as well as the
striking commonalities and differences in communication systems brought about by the course of
evolution.
The present Research Topic provides a collection of experimental and observational empirical
studies using qualitative and quantitative approaches, complemented by articles offering reviews,

December 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1919 | 6

Holler et al.

opinions, and models. They aim to inform the reader about
the most recent advances in our endeavor of unraveling the
workings of the human turn-taking system in communicative
interaction. The contributions are organized into six sections:
(1) Foundations of turn-taking, (2) Signals and mechanisms for
prediction and timing, (3) Planning next turns in conversation,
(4) Effects of context and function on timing, (5) Turn-taking in
signed languages, and (6) Development of turn-taking skills.

FOUNDATIONS OF TURN-TAKING
The articles in this section outline models of human turntaking, specify the interaction of the various psycholinguistic
processes that underlie our ability to take conversational turns
on time, and test the applicability of human turn-taking models
to non-human animal species. Levinson and Torreira review
behavioral and cognitive findings specifying the parameters of
the processes underlying the human turn-taking system. This
empirical evidence is synthesized into a model claiming that
intention ascription and response planning begin as early as
possible during the incoming turn, running through all the
serial stages of speech production à la Levelt (1989) before
the response is launched, triggered by turn-final cues. Garrod
and Pickering propose a model that specifies two processes.
The first is based on the entrainment of brain oscillations that
allow listeners to predict when the incoming turn will end. The
second is constrained by the first and based on covert imitation,
allowing listeners to determine the intention conveyed by the
incoming turn. The final article in this section addresses the
phylogenetic development of turn-taking skills. Henry et al. look
at the European Starling’s turn-taking behavior, finding evidence
for both temporal and structural regularities, the influence of
the immediate as well as the wider social context in which
turns are produced, and of emitter-specific factors influencing
the behavior—thus pointing toward strong similarities with some
of the features shaping turn-taking in humans. In addition, they
provide comparisons with other starling species, leading the
authors to argue for turn-taking behavior having co-evolved in
close interdependency with social structure.
The empirical studies collected in the rest of this Research
Topic support various components of these proposed turn-taking
models while in places being at odds with some of the claims
made. As much as the current volume is a summary of the stateof-the-art in the field, it also aims to stimulate future research that
will help us piece together the parts of the remarkable puzzle that
human turn-taking poses.

SIGNALS AND MECHANISMS FOR
PREDICTION AND TIMING
One of the central debates on the cognitive processes involved
in turn-taking focuses on the role played by prediction. Part of
this debate is the issue of which kinds of cues adults may use
for predicting the end of turns, allowing them to come in on
time. The article by Riest et al. further advances this debate by
testing, in three offline experiments, the relative contribution

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Editorial: Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

of syntactic, and semantic information to turn-end anticipation.
It shows that, while both types of information are essential,
adults rely predominantly on the latter. The article by Holler and
Kendrick builds on this work by using eye-tracking technology
to investigate the responses of observers directly immersed in
a conversational setting. The data show that observers’ eye
movements toward next speakers are not random but guided by
points of possible completion in current turns, thus revealing
interactants’ sensitivity and orientation toward the semantic,
syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic information that becomes
available as turns unfold. The article by Hiroko zooms into
the projective power of specific lexicogrammatical particles in
Japanese (wa, mo, and tte). These become available to listeners
as turns unfold in conversation and often allow next speakers to
predict the content of ongoing turns. Himbert et al. throw light
on yet another source of information that speakers in interaction
may use for timing their turns: their analysis demonstrates that
interlocutors adapt their turn-taking rhythms to one another,
which they argue is facilitated by the alignment of semantic and
syntactic processes.

PLANNING NEXT TURNS IN
CONVERSATION
The contributions in this section explore some of the cognitive
processes involved in preparing next turns in conversation.
Applying a cutting edge statistical approach (“random forests”)
to data from a large conversational corpus, Roberts et al. explore
the value of both psycholinguistic factors (e.g., word frequency
and syntactic complexity) and conversational structures (e.g., the
sequential relationships between turns) as explanatory factors
when modeling the timing of turns in conversation. Their
results show that both sets of factors significantly contribute
to explaining variation in turn timing. Torreira et al. study
pre-answer in-breaths in a dialogue setting using insights
from acoustic and inductive plethysmography recordings. They
demonstrate that the occurrence of an in-breath is dependent
on the length of an answer, suggesting that answers are planned
prior to these in-breaths. Since the pre-answer in-breaths in their
data were launched close to the end of question turns, the data
provide evidence for the concurrence of comprehension and next
utterance planning.

EFFECTS OF CONTEXT AND FUNCTION
ON TIMING
Three articles investigate the interplay of turn-taking rules
with other principles shaping human behavior in specific
conversational contexts. Kendrick shows that turns dealing
with problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding (i.e.,
other-initiations of repair) are governed by different timing
principles and can thus break the common pattern of minimal
gaps between turns. As the analysis reveals, the longer gaps
characteristic of repair sequences tend to be used by participants
as opportunities to either allow the producer of the trouble
source to resolve the issue before repair is initiated, to allow

December 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1919 | 7

Holler et al.

themselves to resolve their problems in understanding before
initiating repair, or to signal problems in understanding through
visual displays (e.g., eyebrow raise) before initiating repair
verbally. The article by Gardner and Mushin provides evidence
from Garrwa, an indigenous Australian language, for turns
that are followed by substantially longer gaps than one would
ordinarily expect based on prior work on English conversations.
In these cases, however, it is not repair that drives the
longer turn transition times; the environment in which they
occur is slow-paced conversation, appearing to reduce the
pressure for gap minimization. Stevanovic and Peräkylä discuss
perspectives on the intersection of two different systems of
temporal organization, that of turns at talk and that of emotional
reciprocity—the former favoring sequential organization, the
latter affording simultaneity and immediate uptake through
emotional contagion and mimicry.

TURN-TAKING IN SIGNED LANGUAGES
The research presented in this section investigates the principles
of turn-taking and sequence organization in signed languages
where communication is constrained to the visual modality.
De Vos et al. analyze the timing of turns in Sign Language of
the Netherlands (NGT), showing that the timing of turns in
signed conversation looks remarkably similar to that of spoken
interaction (i.e., with minimal gaps and minimal overlaps)
when considering not simply onset and offset of manual
movements but individual movement phases (preparations,
strokes, retractions). Girard-Groeber examines turn-taking
principles in multi-party conversations in Swiss German Sign
Language (DSGS), focusing on the occurrence of overlaps. She,
too, finds striking similarities with spoken interactions: the
examples provided illustrate a strong orientation to the “one at
a time” principle, an orientation of participants toward points of
possible completion in the sign stream, and a set of principles
that appear to determine deviations from this rule (such as
repair initiations or strong disagreements). Manrique and Enfield
focus on a particular type of turn transition environment—
other-initiated-repair—in Argentine Sign Language (LSA), thus
complementing Kendrick’s work on repair in spoken interaction
(this volume). However, their focus is on how repair is elicited
in visual question-answer sequences rather than on the timing
of turns in the repair environment, revealing the frequent use of
a visual display form termed the “freeze-look.” Next to clearly
unique features, the three articles point toward some striking

REFERENCES
Bögels, S., Magyari, L., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). Neural signatures of response
planning occur midway through an incoming question in conversation. Sci.
Rep. 5:12881. doi: 10.1038/srep12881
de Ruiter, J., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. (2006). Projecting the end of a speaker’s
turn: A cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535. doi:
10.1353/lan.2006.0130
Ford, C. E., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). “Interactional units in conversation:
syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the projection of turn

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Editorial: Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

similarities regarding the timing and organization of turns in
spoken and signed languages.

DEVELOPMENT OF TURN-TAKING SKILLS
Convergent findings regarding principles governing turn-taking
across languages in different modalities hint at the possibility
of a shared cognitive infrastructure underlying all human
communicative interaction. This cognitive infrastructure may
also account for the ease with which young children appear
to acquire the necessary skills to interact with others. The
contributions included in this section focus on the acquisition
of turn-taking in very young infants and in children as they
start to master spoken language. The first two articles suggest
that temporal turn-taking skills are learned early on in infancy.
Gratier et al. demonstrate that already at 8–21 weeks babies
are active participants in, as well as initiators of, turn-taking
sequences, but also that at this early stage of development
mothers play a core role in the timing of turns by adapting their
behavior to the infant. Hilbrink et al. provide a longitudinal study
showing that turn-timing skills continue to develop continuously
from 3 to 18 months, with some regressive slowing down
as language comprehension kicks in around the “9 month
revolution” (Tomasello, 2008). Clark and Lindsey provide a case
study of one child’s (1;4-3;5 years) verbal and gestural responses
to questions. The pattern they find nicely fits with the temporal
slowing down in vocal turn-timing caused by the challenge
of having to master language—while verbal responses often
occurred with long delays, the child frequently produced gestural
responses preceding speech. The following two articles examine
children’s use of linguistic cues for anticipating upcoming next
turns when observing dyadic conversations. Keitel and Daum
find that three but not 1 year olds are able to make use of
intonational cues for predicting upcoming next turns. In line
with this, Lammertink et al. find that 2 year olds make use of
prosodic cues for predicting upcoming next turns, but that they
make use of lexicosyntactic cues, too, even weighing these more
strongly—just like adults do.

FUNDING
The authors were supported through the Max Planck Gesellschaft
and European Research Council (Advanced grant #269484
INTERACT awarded to SCL) during the preparation of the
editorial and the research topic as a whole.

completion,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S.
A. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 135–184.
Indefrey, P., and Levelt, W. J. (2004). The spatial and temporal signatures
of word production components. Cognition 92, 101–144. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2002.06.001
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Levinson, S. C. (2006). “On the human “interaction engine”,” in Roots of Human
Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds N. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson
(Oxford: Berg), 39–69.

December 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1919 | 8

Holler et al.

Levinson, S. C. (2013). “Action formation and ascription,” in The Handbook
of Conversation Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell), 103–130.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.1353/lan.1974.0010
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: Volume 1:
A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T.,
et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.09036
16106

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Editorial: Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Holler, Kendrick, Casillas and Levinson. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC
BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution
or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

December 2015 | Volume 6 Article 1919 | 9

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 12 June 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00731

Timing in turn-taking and its
implications for processing models
of language
Stephen C. Levinson 1,2* and Francisco Torreira1
1

Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2 Donders
Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Edited by:
Manuel Carreiras,
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain
and Language, Spain
Reviewed by:
Brian MacWhinney,
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Martin John Pickering,
The University of Edinburgh, UK

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.
Keywords: turn-taking, conversation, language processing, language production, language comprehension

*Correspondence:
Stephen C. Levinson,
Language and Cognition Department,
Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1,
6525 XD Nijmegen, Netherlands
stephen.levinson@mpi.nl
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 28 January 2015
Accepted: 16 May 2015
Published: 12 June 2015
Citation:
Levinson SC and Torreira F (2015)
Timing in turn-taking and its
implications for processing models
of language.
Front. Psychol. 6:731.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00731

1. Introduction: Why Turn-Taking in Conversation is Important
for the Psychology of Language
One 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. The bursts tend to involve a
phrasal or clausal unit, but can be longer or shorter. 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. Yet this prime
use of language involves rapid switching between comprehension and production at a
rate implying that these processes must sometimes overlap. 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

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 10

Levinson and Torreira

around 200 ms (see Section 5). This would seem to imply that
participants planning to respond are already encoding their
responses while the incoming turn from the other speaker
is still unfinished. This in turn implies potentially long-range
prediction in comprehension. A sketch model of the interleaving
of comprehension and production processes is presented in
Section 7.
To appreciate the full nature of this puzzle, it is essential
to review what we know about the turn-taking system and its
temporal properties. In Section 2, we review the foundational
Sacks et al. (1974; henceforth SSJ) model of turn-taking,
considering alternative proposals in Sections 3 and 4. The
model proposes extensive prediction (or ‘projection’) of turnends, and an expectation of swift response. The systematicity
of turn-taking and its temporal patterning are borne out
by extensive corpus analyses (Section 5). We then turn
to the psycholinguistic literature (Section 6), noting that
sensitivity to turn-end cues is already shown early in child
development. We point out that there is considerable evidence
for predictive language comprehension, and for long latencies in
language production, so that the central psycholinguistic puzzle
(Section 6.5) posed by turn-taking seems to be resolved by
predicting what the other interlocutor is going to say. Some
direct recent investigations seem to bear this out (Section 6.4),
although experimentation in this field is in its infancy. In
Section 7 we take stock of the recent findings, and sketch a
processing model addressing some of the processing puzzles
involved.

2. Turn-Taking as a System: Research
from Conversation Analysis
Sacks et al. (1974; SSJ) initiated the modern literature on
conversational turn-taking by outlining how this behavior
constitutes a system of social interaction with specific properties.
It is not organized in advance (by say an order of speaking,
or set units to be uttered), but is highly flexible, allowing for
longer units when so mutually arranged, and organizing an
indeterminate number of participants into a single conversation.
The authors note that “overwhelmingly one speaker talks at
a time. Occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are
common but brief [. . .] Transitions (from one turn to the
next) with no gap and no overlap are common, and together
with slight gaps and slight overlaps make up the majority
of transitions” (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 700). Obviously, such
turn-taking behavior contrasts with the absence of turn-taking
in cheering, heckling, laughing, etc. That things could be
otherwise in the speech domain is shown by the contrasting
speech exchange systems we also use, as in lectures where
questions come at the end, or in a press conference where
questions come from many parties but are answered by one,
contrasting with a classroom where questions may come from
the teacher alone, and may be answered by many volunteers.
The importance of the conversational system is that, unlike the
others, it appears to be the default mode of language use, as
shown by its operation in the context of language learning,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

and among friends and family. As far as we know, it operates
in a strongly universal way (cf. Stivers et al., 2009, 2010),
while the other speech exchange systems are mostly culturespecific.
Sacks et al. (1974) argued that conversation is an elemental
piece of social organization, regulated by social norms that
prescribe one speaker at a time but allow open participation.
The model they suggested consists of turn units and rules
that operate over those units. The units they suggested are
variable sizes of syntactic units, whose functions as full
turns can be indicated prosodically. The end of such a unit
constitutes a ‘transition relevance place’ or TRP. The rules
specify:
(1) If the current speaker C selects the next speaker N, then
C must stop, and N should start. (‘Selection’ could involve
address terms, gaze, or in the case of dyadic conversation
defaults to the other.)
(2) If C does not select N, than any participant can self-select,
first starter gaining rights to that next unit.
(3) If no other party self-selects, C may continue.
These rules then recursively apply at each TRP.
These rules predict that intra-speaker silent gaps (generated
by rule 3) will be longer than inter-speaker ones, a fact shown
to be correct on large samples of conversation [ten Bosch
et al., 2005 report gaps between continuations by the same
speaker to be about 140 ms (c. 25%) longer than the average
gap in turn transitions between different speakers]. It has also
been suggested that on this basis a turn-taking ‘beat’ or ‘clock’
(with a period between 80 and 180 ms) can be discerned,
suggesting a model of coupled oscillators that allow participants
to synch (Wilson and Zimmerman, 1986; Wilson and Wilson,
2005).
It was evident to Sacks et al. (1974) that the model had
consequences for language processing. They noted that, given
that interlocutors may be addressed at any point, the system
enforces obligate listening. More importantly, they noted that
the speed of speaker transition would require ‘projection’
(prediction) of the end of the incoming turn, and production
processes would have to begin before the end of the incoming
turn, in part because turn beginnings have to be designed to
facilitate that very projection (Sacks et al., 1974, 719; Levinson,
2013). Later corpus studies have established, as we shall see
(see Section 4), that the great proportion of turn transitions
fall between −100 and 500 ms, that is, between a short stretch
of overlap to a gap with a duration equivalent to one to three
syllables.
There is a great deal of later work in conversation analysis
(CA) that has contributed to our understanding of this system
(see Clayman, 2013; Drew, 2013; Hayashi, 2013 for overviews). It
is important to appreciate that not all overlapping of turns can
be understood as behavior that violates the rules above – some
authors (see Section 4) have seen the frequency of overlap as
undercutting the Sacks et al. (1974) model. Sacks et al. (1974)
claimed that overlaps are common, but usually very short, and
often accounted for by little additions to the first turn like address

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 11

Levinson and Torreira

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

forms or tags [as in (1)], or by misanalyses of when the turn is
coming to an end [as in (2) where ‘biscuits’ was projected as the
turn-end but it was followed by ‘and cheese’; overlap indicated
with square brackets]:
(1) Sacks et al. (1974, p. 707)

(9) A: Uh you been down here before havenche.
B:

Yeh. [NB: III:3:5]

(2) Jefferson (1984, p. 15)
1. Vera: they muucked intuh biscuits. They had (.) quite a lotta
2.
–> biscuit [s’n ch] e e | : : : s e. ]
3. Jenny: –>
[Oh : :] well thaht’s it th]en [ye[s.
Note especially that some overlaps – namely competing (more
or less simultaneous) first starts – are expectable by the rules
above (as when two people start simultaneously by rule 2, or a
participant operating rule 2 is a bit slow and overlaps with the
current speaker continuing by rule 3). In these cases one or the
other of the speakers normally drops out (impressionistic gap
duration in seconds between brackets):
(3) Hayashi, 2013, p. 176 (from Auto Discussion)
(1) Curt:
Mmm I’d like t’get a, high one if I cou:ld.
(2)
(0.7)
(3) Gary: –> [I know uh-]
(4) Mike: –> [Lemme ask ] a guy at work. He’s gotta bunch
a’ old clu[nkers.
When there is competition to maintain the floor in these
and other cases, this is often negotiated on a syllable by syllable
basis, with e.g., deceleration, increase of intensity, and repeated
syllables or words, until one speaker drops out (Schegloff,
2000).
Just as different kinds of overlap can be discerned, so can
different kinds of absence of speech, differentiating between
pauses (e.g., between units by the same speaker), gaps (between
speakers), silences (meaningful absence of speech, e.g., after a
question), and lapses (where no-one has self-selected to speak).
It has been suggested (citations below) that participants are
very sensitive to timing, so that an excessively long gap after
a question, for instance, may be taken to indicate that the
recipient has some kind of problem with it, for example finding
it difficult to answer in the affirmative, or has uncertainty about
the response. In the following a telephone caller takes gap of
around 2 s to indicate the answer ‘no,’ which he himself then
pre-emptively provides:
(4) Levinson, 1983, p. 320
C: So I was wondering would you be in your office on
Monday (.) by any chance?
(2.0 s)
C: Probably not.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

A considerable body of work has gone into understanding
the role of extended gaps or silences in ‘dispreferred’ responses
(responses not in line with the suggested action in the prior
turn; see Pomerantz and Heritage, 2013 for review). Corpus
analysis shows that gaps of 700 ms or more are associated
with dispreferred actions, and that gaps longer than the norm
(>300 ms) decrease the likelihood of an unqualified acceptance,
and increase the likelihood that a response, be it acceptance
or rejection, will have a dispreferred turn format (e.g., Yes,
but. . . in the cases of acceptances; Kendrick and Torreira, 2015).
Experimental work also shows that gaps of 600 ms or longer
generate inferences of this unwelcome kind (Roberts et al., 2011).
The CA approach to turn-taking raises two major issues. The
first is what exactly counts as a turn, and how participants can
recognize such a unit as complete. The problem is that just
about any word or phrase may in context constitute a turn,
while syntactic units can be nested or conjoined indefinitely.
Regarding this issue, Sacks et al. (1974, p. 721) note that “some
understanding of sound production (i.e., phonology, intonation,
etc.) is also very important to turn-taking organization.” Thus
in the following (drawn from the discussion in Clayman, 2013,
p. 155), the terminal intonation contours do not occur till the
end of the turns, and two turns each composed of three possibly
complete syntactic units (divided by §) occur uninterrupted (note
the whole is recognized by the recipient as a story under way,
hence the continuers, which are themselves possibly elicited by
rising intonation marked with ‘?’):
(5)
(6)

Ford and Thompson (1996, p. 151)
K: Vera (.) was talking §on the phone §to her mom?
C: mm hm
K: And uh she got off §the phone §and she was
incredibly upset?
C: Mm hm.

In addition to syntactic and prosodic completeness, pragmatic
completeness may be required to terminate a turn (Ford and
Thompson, 1996; Levinson, 2013). Clearly a responsive action
following the first part of a pair of actions like questions and
answers, offers and acceptances, requests and compliances can
be inspected for pragmatic efficacy; elsewhere the larger role in
a sequence of speech acts may need to be satisfied.
The second major issue is ‘projection’ or predictive language
understanding. Sacks et al. (1974) thought it clear that the turntaking system can only work if there is extensive prediction in
comprehension, so that recipients can use the unfolding turn to
project an overall syntactic and prosodic envelope which would
allow them to foresee when and how a turn would come to
an end (see Clayman, 2013 for a review). It is not at all clear
how this works, given the flexibility and extendibility of most
syntactic units. Still, interesting insights are provided by such
phenomena as turn-completion by the other, studied in depth by
Lerner (1991, 2002; see also Hayashi, 2013). A typical example is
where a bi-clausal structure is begun by speaker A, and the second
clause completed by speaker B as below. Clearly an If..then..
or Whenever. . ., X. . . structure projects a second downstream
clause.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 12

Levinson and Torreira

(7) Lerner (1991, p. 445)
1. Rich:
if you bring it intuh them
2. Carol: –> ih don’t cost yuh nothing.
Such cases do not alone show that recipients accurately predict
the content of the second clause (indeed sometimes a jokey
exploitation of the structure may appear). But sometimes exactly
the same words do occur in overlap:
(8) Lerner (1991, p. 239)
1A:
You have too many white friends. You don’t know
2
how to be with (.) your p[eople
3B: ->
[people
4A:
Why are you not proud of (0.2) [you:r [peo:ple
5C: ->
[you:r [peo:ple
6B: ->
[◦ people◦ .
Such intrusions into others’ turns are rare, and can act as
demonstrations of understanding, occurring more routinely if
speaker A is obviously engaged in a word-search and speaker B
can provide the item. Cases like these demonstrate that extensive
projection is possible, and psycholinguistic evidence supports this
(Predictive Language Comprehension).

3. An Alternative Signaling Approach
The term ‘turn-taking’ was independently suggested by Yngve
(1970) and Duncan (1972). Contemporaneous with the approach
by Sacks et al. (1974), Duncan (1972, 1974) proposed, using
videotapes of dialogs, a set of turn-taking signals. The main
set are turn-handing-over signals, and consists of half a dozen
cues: prosodic (type of final intonation, final syllable duration,
final drop in pitch, or loudness), gestural (end of a gesture), and
lexical/syntactic (tag, clause end, etc.). A second proposed signal
is turn-maintaining and consists of a final mid-tone, continuing
gesture or a gaze switch away. Turns followed by speaker change
were found to nearly always occur with one or more turn-ending
cues. On this basis, Duncan advanced a model where the turntaking system is entirely under the control of the current speaker.
This contrasts with the CA model, where speaker transition is
contingently achieved by one speaker coming to the end of a unit
and another starting (e.g., by self-selection). In addition, in the
CA model there are no context-free signals: e.g., in English, a final
mid tone usually marks turn-holding, but in specific contexts
it may indicate turn-yielding (as when the conjunction or is
appended to polar questions, e.g., Are you leaving, or. . .?); thus
turn-taking can only be achieved on some much more global
understanding of the incoming turn.
Although the signaling view is largely superseded, the research
drew attention to (a) the importance of visual cues, and (b)
the coincidence of turn transitions with a number of features
of turn construction, prosody, gesture, etc. Kendon (1967) had
earlier described different patterns of gaze between speakers (who
alternately look away and look to addressees) and addressees
(who gaze longer at the speaker). Goodwin (1980) later proposed

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

a rule that sometime during the course of a turn a speaker should
glance at the addressee, expecting to find a gazing addressee
whenever he or she looks. The idea that speaker gaze when
returning to addressee could function as a turn-yielding cue is,
however, not easy to substantiate; More recently, Rossano (2013)
has suggested this is because gaze is actually oriented to larger
units of conversation (sequences), which it may serve to open and
close.

4. Challenges to the Standard Model
Recently an alternative view to the Sacks et al. (1974) account was
advanced by Heldner and Edlund (2010), who argue that turntaking does not have all of the systematic properties described
by Sacks et al. (1974). First, they find fault with the claim that
speakers aim at no gap and no overlap. Actual zero gaps (under
10 ms) represent less than 1% of transitions and overlaps average
40% of transitions in their corpora. “From these observations,
we conclude that the target with respect to timing of turn-taking
cannot be one-speaker-at-a-time and no-gap–no-overlap, and
furthermore that precision timing in turn-taking can neither be
used in arguments in favor of projection, nor against reaction
as models of timing in turn-taking” (Heldner and Edlund, 2010,
p. 567). We believe these conclusions are misguided, and spell out
the reasons here.
First, a target of 10 ms precision may not be realistic of human
performance. Voiceless stops in English average between 60 and
80 ms (Crystal and House, 1988; Byrd, 1993), and at the end
of a turn will be hard to distinguish from the beginning of the
gap. Perceptual “no gap” was always estimated by conversation
analysts to be of the order of 150–250 ms (i.e., close to the speaker
transition mode; Schegloff, 2000). Heldner (2011) himself has
gone on to show most usefully that a gap or overlap under 120 ms
is not perceived as gap or overlap, respectively. It is interesting to
compare the tolerable degree of lag in cross-modal matching as in
the McGurk effect: an auditory signal following a visual one by up
to 180 ms will still seem to be synchronized (Munhall et al., 1996).
The majority (51–55%) of all turn transitions across corpora take
place in under 200 ms (Heldner and Edlund, 2010, p. 563).
Second, as explained above, overlaps are of different kinds,
some (e.g., continuers like hmhm, or minimal terminal overlaps)
not being heard as intrusions on the turn, and others (like
competing first starts) being specifically expectable. Below we
provide a quantitative study of overlap (Overlap), which shows
that overlaps tend to be minimal in size and occupy less than 5%
of the speech stream.
Meanwhile, the argument that there is no target to avoid
overlap seems unlikely. Qualitative analysis shows, as mentioned,
that when overlap occurs, one speaker tends to rapidly drop out
[as in example (3) above] so that the bulk of overlaps are of short
duration. ‘Interruption’ is a sanctionable breach of social mores,
as every child learns. The systematic properties of all the corpora
that have been studied would be entirely different if overlap was
not avoided.
On the basis of their dismissal of the no-gap–no-overlap
target, Heldner and Edlund (2010, p. 566) go on to attack

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 13

Levinson and Torreira

further aspects of the standard model: “Thus, the no-gap–
no-overlap principle (Sacks et al., 1974) can neither be
used as a part of an argument in favor of projection nor
against reaction simply because the no-gap–no-overlap cases
hardly ever occur in real speaker change data. Importantly,
this means that a principal motivation for projection in
turn-taking is invalid.” This attack on projection as a
central element of the model will prove misplaced when
we turn to consider the psycholinguistic evidence below (in
fact Heldner and Edlund, 2010, p. 566 later concede that
projection of content may be responsible for overlaps and short
gaps).
The central plank of the dismissal of projection is that turntaking is often not as rapid as has been claimed. Heldner and
Edlund (2010, p. 563) note:
“The cumulative distribution above the 200 ms threshold was also
of interest, as it represented the cases where reaction to cessation
of speech might be relevant given published minimal reaction
times for spoken utterances (Fry, 1975; Izdebski and Shipp,
1978; Shipp et al., 1984). The distribution above this threshold
represented 41–45% of all between-speaker intervals. These cases
were thus potentially long enough to be reactions to the cessation
of speech, or even more so to some prosodic information just
before the silence.”

There are two separate proposals here. The first is that for gaps
longer than 200 ms, participants might simply react to silence.
This threshold is implausible. First, silence will only become
recognizable as silence after c. 200 ms (after all the duration of
voiceless stop consonants ranges up to 180 ms; cf. Heldner and
Edlund, 2010), at which point it will still take a further minimally
200 ms to react (so 400 ms in total). That minimal reaction is for a
prepared vowel (Fry, 1975), and any more complex response will
increase according to Hick’s Law (see below); a choice between
one of two prepared responses takes 350 ms for example. We now
have, say, 550 ms from actual cessation of speech till beginning
of a minimal response, and as Heldner and Edlund (2010) note
70–82% of responses are within 500 ms. Thus reaction to silence,
although certainly possible in a minority of cases, would not seem
to play a major role in the organization of turn-taking (see Riest
et al., 2015).
The second proposal is that there is the possibility of reaction
to “some prosodic information just before the silence.” Here there
is less room for disagreement; CA practitioners and associated
phoneticians have themselves emphasized the role of turn-final
intonational and segmental cues (see Walker, 2013 for a review).
Duncan drew attention to turn-keeping intonation cues and
lengthened (‘drawled’) syllables. Critical here are two factors:
(a) it must be shown not only (as Duncan did) that there are
available prosodic/phonetic features of turn-ends, but also that
participants actually use them, (b) the location of the features
with respect to the turn end is important (e.g., sentence accents
in English sometimes occur well before turn ends, in which case
talk of projection suits better than talk of reaction to terminal
cues, cf. Wells and Macfarlane, 1998). Bögels and Torreira
(in press) provide experimental evidence that listeners do use
turn-final prosodic information (located in the last syllable of

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

the utterance) to identify turn ends in Dutch questions with
final rising intonation. Further research should investigate other
linguistic contexts.
Another notion that has some currency is that turn-taking
could be driven by coupled oscillators (Wilson and Wilson,
2005). Coupled oscillators have been shown to play a role in
coordination in the animal world, e.g., in the synchronization of
fire-fly flashing where an individual’s flashes reset the neighboring
fireflies’ oscillators, so gradually converging on a single beat.
However, it is well known that human synchronization does not
primarily work in this way, but rather by means of temporal
estimation, which is easily shown by demonstrating that humans
can tap together without waiting to hear the others’ taps
(Buck and Buck, 1976). Moreover, given the highly variable
lengths of turns, nothing like the firefly mechanism can work
in conversation. Indeed, human coordination in general relies
on simulating the other’s task, thus on high-level cognition
(Sebanz and Knoblich, 2008). There is, however, room for
a low level metronome, as it were, and Wilson and Wilson
(2005) suggest that readiness to speak is governed by the
syllable, so that participant A’s beginning of a syllable tends
to coincide with B’s least readiness to speak, while the end
of the syllable coincides with B’s increased readiness. There is
indeed some evidence for entrainment or accommodation of
the gap size between specific dyads, but there is no such effect
on intra-turn pauses (ten Bosch et al., 2005) suggesting that
turn-transition timing is rather unconnected to other temporal
properties of speaking, although more research is required
here.
Careful observers have convinced themselves that such a
‘beat’ is set up in English conversation by stress-timing, such
that interlocutors producing unmarked actions with their turns
tend to come in ‘on the beat’ (Couper-Kuhlen, 2009). However,
the perceived rhythm of speech does not appear to have direct
acoustic correlates, and to date we are unable to objectively
confirm these observations (note too that languages differ in their
rhythmic properties). Interestingly, recent corpus measurements
show that, rather than the entrainment of a conversational beat,
there is a reverse correlation of speaker A’s speech rate and
speaker B’s response timing, perhaps because B has less time
to plan her message as A’s speech rate increases, and vice versa
(Roberts et al., 2015).

5. Statistical Studies of Corpora
The statistical study of turn-taking began early, prompted by
developments in telephony, with a special interest in the speed
of turn-transition (e.g., Norwine and Murphy, 1938). It has
become standard to represent overlaps and gaps on a single
time scale [sometimes called ‘the floor transfer offset’ (FTO)] in
which positive values correspond to gaps, and negative values
represent overlap. Table 1 summarizes average values of FTOs
in ten languages as reported in four studies (caveat: codings and
methods differ somewhat in these studies). Note that although
mean values vary, they do so in narrow window, roughly a quarter
of a second either side of the cross-linguistic mean, and that

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 14

Levinson and Torreira

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

TABLE 1 | Average floor transfer offsets (FTOs) in ten different languages
as reported by four different studies.
Language

Average FTO (ms)

Source

English

410

Norwine and Murphy (1938)∗

English

480

Sellen (1995)∗

English

460

Sellen (1995)

Dutch
Japanese

−78

De Ruiter et al. (2006)∗

7

Stivers et al. (2009)

Tzeltal

67

Stivers et al. (2009)

Yélî-Dnye

71

Stivers et al. (2009)

Dutch

108

Stivers et al. (2009)

Korean

182

Stivers et al. (2009)

English

236

Stivers et al. (2009)

Italian

309

Stivers et al. (2009)

Lao

419

Stivers et al. (2009)

Danish

468

Stivers et al. (2009)

423

Stivers et al. (2009)

Ākhoe Hai|| om
∗ No

eye-contact between conversation participants.

the factors affecting response times are uniform across cultures
(Stivers et al., 2009). In the following two sections, we look in
more detail at the distribution of gaps and overlaps.

sample was from videotape and included early visual responses
(e.g., nods) and audible pre-utterance inbreaths. The general
finding was that although languages differ, e.g., in their degree of
use of visual modality or mean response times, the factors that
speeded or slowed response times (e.g., gaze, agreement) were
shared. Heldner (2011) shows that estimates of the percentage of
perceived overlaps and gaps in this sample match closely other
quantitative samples.
The intensive study of turn-taking under different conditions
is still in its infancy. We know that responses to Wh-questions
are slower than polar (yes–no) questions cross-linguistically
(unpublished data from the Stivers et al., 2009 study), presumably
because of the greater cognitive complexity of response involved.
Longer answers can also be shown to take more preparation,
reflected in both reaction times, and breathing preparation
(Torreira et al., 2015). Complexity of response has also been
shown to influence timings in children’s responses (Casillas,
2014). We also know that individuals tend to accommodate to
the gap-length of others, so that when changing conversational
partners, individuals’ response times change to match their new
interlocutors (ten Bosch et al., 2004, 2005). And intriguingly,
transition speeds are higher on the phone than face-to-face
(Levinson, 1983; ten Bosch et al., 2005).

5.2. Overlap
5.1. Distribution of Gaps
About half a century ago, Brady (1968) reported average gap
durations of 345–456 ms and medians from 264 to 347 ms
(depending on the threshold used in the automatic detection of
speech) in a corpus of sixteen telephone calls between friends
in the USA. Task-oriented interaction shows surprisingly similar
patterns [e.g., Verbmobil – a travel scheduling task by telephone,
has geometric means of 380 ms (English), 363 ms (German),
389 ms (Japanese); Weilhammer and Rabold, 2003]. In a wide
review, Heldner and Edlund (2010) looked at three different
corpora, automatically processing two of them for speaker
transitions: a Dutch dialog corpus, and English and Swedish Map
Tasks (where interlocutors must adjust their positions on slightly
mismatching maps). The first two corpora included both faceto-face and non-face-to-face interaction. Heldner and Edlund
(2010) found closely matching patterns across corpora, with
combined scale (FTO) modes for speaker transition at c. 200 ms
(i.e., a short gap) and c. 60% of transitions being gaps, 40%
overlaps (including any overlap of greater than 10 ms; the modal
overlap is less than 50 ms in the Spoken Dutch Corpus). Around
41–45% of gaps were longer than 200 ms, and between 70 and
82% of all transitions were shorter than 500 ms.
These quantitative approaches generalize over all kinds of
speech acts and responses. But there is also growing work
focused specifically on question–answer timings. Question–
answer sequences are an interesting context to examine, because
questions make a floor transfer relevant, whereas in other
contexts a floor transfer between speakers is often optional.
Stivers et al. (2009) looked at 10 languages from around the
world, including smaller, unwritten languages, and found rather
fast transitions in polar question contexts, with means between
7 and 468 ms, and modes from 0 to 200 ms. The coding of this

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

In contrast to gaps, the study of overlap in corpora has provided
only gross facts. As mentioned, Heldner and Edlund (2010)
report c. 40% of speaker-transitions involving overlaps (including
any overlap of greater than 10 ms). Their histogram makes clear
that the modal overlap is less than 50 ms in the Spoken Dutch
Corpus, with a mean −610 ms, and median −470 ms. ten Bosch
et al. (2005) report that the proportion of overlaps increases
from 44% in face-to-face conversation to 52% in telephone
conversation, with males more likely to overlap their interlocutor
than females, but looking just at the transition from speaker
A to speaker B, 80% of transitions are gaps and 20% partial
overlaps in face-to-face conversation (the corresponding figures
for telephony are 73 and 27%).
Because of the lack of detailed statistical analysis of overlaps
in corpora, we have undertaken a new analysis of overlaps
in the Switchboard Corpus of English telephone conversations
(Godfrey et al., 1992). We address the following questions:
(1) In running speech, how common is overlap (i.e.,
simultaneous talk by more than one party at a time)
compared to talk by one party alone?
(2) In floor transfers, how common are overlaps compared to
gaps?
(3) What is the distribution of overlap duration, and where do
overlaps tend to start relative to the interlocutor’s turn?
(4) What is the distribution of different overlap types (cf.
Jefferson, 1986)?

5.2.1. Method
We analyzed a subset of 348 conversations (totaling around
38 h of dyadic conversation) that were free of timing errors,
and with annotations included in the NXT-Switchboard Corpus

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 15

Levinson and Torreira

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

release (Calhoun et al., 2010). To estimate the occurrence of
overlaps in this dataset, we used the operationalization scheme
in Heldner and Edlund (2010). First, based on the phonetic
segmentation of the corpus, we divided each speaker’s signal into
interpausal units (IPUs) delimited by silent intervals of 180 ms
or more. The 50,510 IPUs had an average duration of 1680 ms,
and a median duration of 1227 ms. Second, we defined gaps,
pauses, between-overlaps, and within-overlaps as follows. Gaps
(n = 14648) corresponded to portions of the stereo signal that
contained silence in each speaker’s channel, and that involved
a floor transfer between the two speakers. Between-overlaps
(n = 6524) were floor transfers that occurred without a silent
gap between the speakers, whereas within-overlaps (n = 3343)
were parts of the signal with overlapping inter-pausal units that
did not result in an effective floor transfer. Figure 1 below
illustrates the operationalization of gaps, between-overlaps and
within-overlaps.

5.2.2. Findings
The recordings were divided as follows: 77% of the signal
corresponded to speech by one speaker only, 19.2% to silence
(i.e., either pauses within a speaker’s turn or gaps as defined
above), and only 3.8% to simultaneous speech by both speakers
(either between-overlaps or within-overlaps). If we exclude silent
parts, 95.3% of the speech signal corresponded to speech by
one speaker. This seems to fit well with Sacks and colleagues’
observation that “overwhelmingly, one party speaks at a time”
(Sacks et al., 1974, p. 700).
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 FTOs (i.e., with positive values for gaps and negative
values for between-overlaps). Between-overlaps (negative FTOs)
represented 30.1% of all floor transfers. As for the duration of
overlaps, and their location within the interlocutor’s turn, we
observed that between-overlaps exhibited a distribution highly
skewed to the left, with an estimated modal duration of 96 ms,
a median of 205 ms, a mean of 275 ms, and with 75% of the
data with values below 374 ms. Within-overlaps tended to start
close to the beginning of the utterances that they overlapped,
with a modal offset of 350 ms, a median of 389 ms, a mean of
447 ms, and 75% of the data exhibiting offsets below 532 ms.

FIGURE 2 | Histogram of floor transfer offsets (FTOs) in the
Switchboard Corpus (Godfrey et al., 1992; Calhoun et al., 2010, see
Section 5.2.1 for details). Each bin has a size of 100 ms.

Their duration exhibited a distribution highly skewed to the right,
with an estimated modal duration of 350 ms, a median of 389 ms,
a mean of 447 ms, and 75% of the data with values below 532 ms.
The duration of within-overlaps is thus usually shorter than that
of two syllables. This appears to fit well with Sacks et al.’s (1974)
observation that “occurrences of more than one speaker at a time
are common, but brief.”
We now examine the distribution of different types of
overlaps. A prediction made by the Sacks et al. (1974) model
is that most overlaps should be occasioned by a number of
circumstances emerging from the application of its rules. For
instance: (i) Overlaps often arise when unforeseen additions
to the first speaker’s turn after a transition relevance place
(e.g., during increments or tags); (ii) They may occur after a
silence when two speakers may self-select and launch articulation
without realizing that another party is doing the same thing
(cf. ‘blind spot’ cases, Jefferson, 1986); (iii) They may frequently
arise in cases involving backchannels signaling feedback to the

FIGURE 1 | Illustration of gaps, within-overlaps, and between-overlaps for two speakers (SPK1 and SPK2 ) in our classification scheme following
Heldner and Edlund (2010).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 16

Levinson and Torreira

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

main speaker (e.g., yeah, right) and other minimal utterances that
do not constitute an attempt to take the floor. The Sacks et al.
(1974) model also predicts signs of overlap avoidance when it
occurs, for instance by speakers’ abandoning their turns without
reaching a point of turn completion. Another sign of speakers’
special orientation to overlapping talk is that they may engage in
competition for the floor, for instance by repeating syllables or
words, often with increased intensity and pitch levels (Schegloff,
2000).
To estimate the prevalence of such possible causal contexts for
overlap, in a separate analysis we randomly sampled 100 betweenoverlaps and 100 within-overlaps from our data, and annotated
them for a number of relevant features, including (a) the presence
of a backchannel or brief token of agreement (e.g., yeah, right) in
either the overlapped or overlapping utterance, (b) the presence
of a period of silence within 200 ms from the beginning of the
overlap period, (c) the presence of a transition relevance place
(a point of syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic completion) in the
overlapped turn within the 500 ms leading to the overlap, (d)
an abandoned (i.e., syntactically and prosodically incomplete)
utterance by any of the two speakers during or immediately
following the overlap interval, and (e) the presence of repeated
syllables or words in any of the two speaker’s utterances during
or immediately following the overlap interval. Other recurrent
features observed during or close to the overlap interval, such as
laughter and disfluencies, were also annotated.
Table 2 shows the most frequent features observed in the data
(note that the features are not mutually exclusive). Interestingly,
the majority of overlap cases (73%) involved a backchannel.
Backchannels, especially continuers like “mm hm” or “uh huh,”
are not construed as full turns, but rather pass up the opportunity
to take a turn, and are thus principled intrusions into the other’s
speech (Schegloff, 2000). It should be noted that, in half of the
between-overlaps, it was not the backchannel that incurred the
overlap, but rather the main speaker who produced an utterance
in overlap with the backchannel. We also noted that overlapping
TABLE 2 | Frequency of seven features in a subset of 200 cases of overlap
(100 between-overlaps, and 100 within-overlaps) extracted from our
Switchboard data.
Betweenoverlaps
(n = 100)

Within-overlaps
(n = 100)

Percentage in
total
(n = 200)

Backchannel or
agreement present

74

72

73%

Follows TRP (<500 ms)

23

51

37%

Follows silence
(simultaneous start)

21

37

29%

Abandoned turn

21

18

19.5%

Follows disfluency in
interlocutor’s turn

4

18

11%

Repeated syllables or
words

4

12

8%

Any of the six features
above

93

97

95%

Note that observations can exhibit more than one feature at the same time (e.g.,
cases of overlap after a period of silence involving a backchannel.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

backchannels often occurred after a TRP or a period of silence,
suggesting that their timing is sensitive to specific cues in the
main speaker’s turn (cf. Gravano and Hirschberg, 2009).
The second most common feature (37%) was the presence
of a possible transition-relevance place (i.e., a point of syntactic,
intonational, and pragmatic turn completion) in the overlapped
turn within a time window of 500 ms before the start of the
overlap. Another common feature was a period of silence (29%).
In cases with this feature, one of the two speakers produced an
utterance briefly after her interlocutor. These cases often involved
a backchannel (n = 35, or 60%), or resulted in one of the two
speakers abandoning their turn prematurely before reaching a
point syntactic and prosodic completion (n = 14, or 24.1%).
The presence of a disfluency in the utterance of the overlapped
speaker before the start of the overlap (i.e., short silent pauses,
repeated syllables or words, or noticeable decreases in speech
rate) was also common. In these cases, it seems that the recipient
produced a backchannel in response to the disfluency at a point
when the interlocutor had already resumed her turn, causing
overlap. In total, cases exhibiting one or more of these six features
accounted for 95% of the data.
The remaining 10 cases involved three terminal betweenoverlaps affecting the last syllable of the previous turn, two cases
exhibiting laughter by one of the speakers, two cases involving a
turn-initial particle (i.e., uhm and well) produced in overlap with
the last syllable of the preceding turn, one case with a speaker
talking to someone else in the room, and one case of overlap due
a clear phonetic segmentation error in the annotation.
Our analysis thus confirms that overlaps, though reasonably
common (30% of transitions), are of short duration (i.e., less than
5% of the speech signal; between-overlaps have a modal duration
96 ms), occur largely in principled places (e.g., in betweenoverlaps, after possible completions, in simultaneous turn-starts),
and mostly involve backchannels (which do not constitute full
turns). In light of these observations, we conclude that the vast
majority of instances of overlap in our dyadic conversations are
consistent with the turn-taking system proposed by Sacks et al.
(1974).

6. Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistic processing puts tight constraints on any
psychologically real model of turn-taking. Here we first draw
attention to the early sensitivity to turn-taking in child
development. Then we consider three main psycholinguistic
aspects: predictive theories of language comprehension, studies
of language production (from conceptual planning to speech
articulation), and ideas about the relation between these two
processes. Finally we turn to a small number of experimental
studies aimed at understanding the relationship between
comprehension and production processes in turn-taking.

6.1. ‘Proto-Conversation’ and Turn Taking in
Human Development
Parallel to Sacks et al. (1974), in the 1970s there was an interest
in children’s acquisition of turn-taking abilities. Trevarthen

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 17

Levinson and Torreira

(1977) and Bruner (1983) coined the term “protoconversation”
for the rhythmic alternation of vocalizations between caregiver and infant in the early months of life, and its systematic
properties were demonstrated by Bateson (1975), with average
turn transitions of about 1.5 s at 3 months. Subsequent work
showed that this gap reduced in the following pre-linguistic
months to around 800 ms (Jasnow and Feldstein, 1986; Beebe
et al., 1988). Such early onset suggests that turn-taking may
have an instinctive basis. Garvey and Berninger (1981) showed
that the gap duration increased toward a second and a half
in toddlers, presumably because of the cognitive difficulties of
language production, and remained at around a second even
for 5-year-olds [this slow convergence with adult norms has
recently been confirmed for a larger sample by Stivers et al.
(under review)].
After a long pause, there is now renewed interest in the
development of turn-taking and its timing in children, and we
now have better data, methods and concepts. Using audiovisual
corpus techniques, Hilbrink et al. (submitted) have confirmed the
general pattern earlier reported, namely relatively fast transitions
in the prelinguistic period, with a slowing down as language
starts to be comprehended at 9 months. Using eye-tracking of
infants watching dyadic interaction, several studies have shown
that 3-year-olds observers of dyadic conversations between two
adults can anticipate speaker transitions (Tice and Henetz, 2011;
Casillas and Frank, 2013, submitted; Keitel et al., 2013). Although
the gaze shifts tend to occur in the gap (i.e., not in overlap
with the turn preceding the floor transition), known saccade
latencies for infants are c. 300 ms (Fernald et al., 2008), showing
that they have often systematically detected the end of the turn
before the gap. Researchers have also been able to show that by
3 year-olds, children are using intonation to do this projection
of turn-ends (Keitel et al., 2013). Casillas and Frank (submitted)
found that 3-year-olds were just as good at anticipating speaker
change as adults, and did so more after questions than statements.
They then looked at younger infants and filtered the speech,
so they could distinguish whether prosody or lexico-syntax was
enabling this anticipation. They found that 1 and 2 year-olds
were better than chance at anticipating transitions, and that
anticipation improves with age. Children under 3 were better
in the prosody-only condition (with words filtered out) than
they were in the words-only condition (with prosody filtered),
indicating an early advantage for prosody (adults only showed an
advantage for words + prosody). Clearly these studies confirm
that projection is a real phenomenon, that it is learnt early,
and that prosody plays an important role in this ability. They
also indicate that turn-taking is established before language,
that it forms a framework for language acquisition, and that
the complexities of language slow down the framework through
middle childhood.

6.2. Predictive Language Comprehension
Early in the history of psycholinguistics, Chomsky (1969, p. 57)
insisted that probability and prediction had no possible role to
play in a scientific theory of language: “It must be recognized that
the notion ‘probability of a sentence’ is an entirely useless one,
under any known interpretation of this term.” He reasoned that a

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

grammar bounds a discrete infinity, and hence there was no core
role for prediction in language understanding. The spell lasted
decades, but meanwhile both engineering and psycholinguistic
experiments have demonstrated a core role for statistical learning
and estimation in language comprehension. For example, eyemovement studies in the visual world paradigm show that
listeners predict upcoming entities from likely collocations (e.g.,
hearing “the boy is eating” participants look at the cake and not
the ball in the picture). Determiners (e.g., French un vs. une),
Adjectives (“freshly baked”) and verbs (“eat”) can predict nouns
by their selectional restrictions; in language that have verbs at the
end of the sentence like Japanese, participants can use the nouns
to predict the verbs (Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Kamide et al.,
2003). Another source of insight comes from EEG, where it can
be shown that the syntactic frame is used to predict upcoming
material. For example, when the sentential context leads one to
expect a specific noun (‘she carried the eggs in a . . .’) but the
gender of an incoming article is incongruous an N400 may be
evoked before the noun itself is encountered (e.g., in Spanish
una canasta ‘a basket’ vs. un costal ‘a sack’). These studies use
the inverse correlation between the cloze probability and the
amplitude of an N400 to demonstrate prediction (it is hard in fact
to distinguish prediction from integration difficulties; see Kutas
et al., 2011 for review). Predictive language comprehension is
not only achieved on the basis of semantic and morphosyntactic
regularities. In an experiment involving visual searches under
the directions of a confederate, Ito and Speer (2008) showed
that participants could anticipate referents on a screen (e.g., a
“drum” vs. a “ball”) on the basis of the location of contrastive
pitch accents in the vocal instructions being given to them (e.g.,
“now take the GREEN ball” vs. “now take the green BALL”).
Listeners therefore appear to be able to use different sorts of
linguistic information (i.e., semantic, morphosyntactic, prosodic)
in order to predict the content of an incoming utterance. For an
overview of recent work on predictive language understanding
see Pickering and Garrod (2013).
Recent investigations have also shown direct connections
of these predictive inferences to projection in conversation.
Gisladottir et al. (2015) conducted an EEG experiment in which
participants listened to mini-dialogs of two turns. The second
turn (e.g., “I have a credit card”) could be invariant over three
conditions, a question like “How are you going to pay?,” an offer
like “I can lend you the money,” or a trouble announcement like
“I don’t have any money.” In each of three contexts, the same
second turn performs a different speech act (i.e., an answer, a
declination, or an offer). The EEG signal, averaged over many
such adjacency pairs, showed that very early (often in the first
400 ms) the different speech act forces of the response were
predicted. Speech act detection is the precondition to response
preparation, and it seems to be an early predictive process.
A second relevant study (Magyari et al., 2014) looked at the EEG
signal of participants listening to turns extracted from genuine
conversations whose turn-endings they had to predict by pressing
a button. These turns had already been sorted into unpredictable
vs. predictable by a cloze test, where participants had to guess the
missing words of items cut-off at various points. The predictable
turns (compared to the unpredictable ones) showed a very early

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 18

Levinson and Torreira

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

EEG signature of preparation to respond about half way through
the turn (c. 1200 ms before the end). Recently Riest et al. (2015)
show experimentally that responses based on prediction are
not significantly different than those based on pre-knowledge.
They also incidentally attempt to estimate stochastic tendencies
for possible reactive responses (although these stimuli are nonlinguistic and do not have the uncertainty associated, e.g., with
voiceless stops). These studies together suggest that quite longrange prediction is normally involved in understanding language
in a conversational mode.

6.3. Latencies in Language Production
There are striking differences between language comprehension
and production despite the fact that the processes must be
intimately related. One of the clearest differences is in processing
speed. Speech production is a bottleneck on the whole language
system: at about an average of seven syllables per second, speech
can be estimated to have a bit-rate of under 100 bps (Levinson,
2000, p. 28). Studies of language production show that prearticulation processes run three or four times faster than actual
articulation (Wheeldon and Levelt, 1995). Studies of language
comprehension under compression show that people can parse
and comprehend speech at three or four times the speed of
speech production (Calvert, 1986, p. 178; Mehler et al., 1993).
Speech encoding is one part of the process that has to be strictly
serial. Articulation is thus a severe bottleneck on communication,
and the system compensates by utilizing pragmatic heuristics
in production that augment the coded message (Levinson,
2000).
Happily, there have been extensive studies of language
production that allow us to quantify the latency in each part of
the production process, using picture naming as a task (Levelt,
1989). The average reaction from seeing a picture to beginning
the naming of has been estimated at 600 ms (Indefrey and Levelt,
2004, p. 106). The literature unfortunately gives no ranges or
standard deviations, with the exception of a study by Bates et al.
(2003), which provides cross-linguistic averages that are much
longer at over 1000 ms, with all minimums over 650 ms. Indefrey
and Levelt (2004, p. 108), on the basis of a meta-study of available
experiments, propose approximate figures for each stage of the
process, which we show in Table 3.
For multiword utterances, the effect is not linear. Naming two
nouns takes 740–800 ms before output begins, with evidence that

TABLE 3 | Estimated average time windows for successive operations in
spoken word encoding (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004, p. 108).
Operation

Duration (ms)

Conceptual preparation (from picture onset to selecting
the target concept)

175

Lemma retrieval
Form encoding:

75

Phonological code retrieval

80

Syllabification

125

Phonetic encoding (till initiation of articulation)

145

Total

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

600

the processing of the second noun has begun but not finished
by this time, while 900 ms is required for three word utterances
(Schnur et al., 2006). Most of these studies incidentally (but
not Bates et al., 2003) involve pre-familiarization of the words
and pictures, so these response times are effectively after some
amount of priming.
There is also good information on the planning required
for sentence production from eye-movement studies. When
participants are shown pictures of simple transitive or intransitive
scenes (e.g., boy kicking ball, girl running), it takes about 1500 ms
before speech output begins (Griffin and Bock, 2000; Gleitman
et al., 2007). Interestingly, what happens within this 1500 ms
is language-dependent – for example verb-first languages show
rather different visual scanning of the pictures than verb medial
languages (Norcliffe et al., 2015), but the latencies remain
similar.
During this period of planning for language production,
output processes involve the synergies between multiple speech
organs. For example, breathing for speaking may need to be
initiated. Earlier studies have shown that such breathing activity
involves a number of latencies: first, c. 140–320 ms must be
allowed for from the time the decision to inhale is made till the
time the signal reaches the intercostal muscles (Draper et al.,
1960); second, the inhalation time in spontaneous dialog is
typically over 500 ms long (McFarland, 2001, p. 136). Together,
these numbers suggest a latency of at least 500–800 ms prior to
speech. In a recent study of breathing in conversation (Torreira
et al., 2015, this volume), we have shown that short responses
to questions are often made on residual lung air, whereas
longer responses are likely to require a planned inhalation.
The actual inhalation most typically starts briefly (i.e., 15 ms)
after the end of the interlocutor’s question, and it is probably
triggered just before the phonological retrieval process for the
first word of the planned response. Thus the breathing data
suggests that whether or not inhalation is required is a decision
made during conceptual planning of the response, and that the
trigger for inhalation, most typically produced during the last
few hundred ms of the interlocutor’s turn, is often based on
a prediction that the current speaker will imminently end her
turn.
Recent studies of vocal preparation using ultrasound
techniques show that tongue movements preceding speech
production start considerably before the acoustic signal, with
clear preparation between 120 and 180 ms prior to the acoustic
release (Schaeffler et al., 2014) and with some effects detectable
as early as 480 ms (Drake et al., 2014). Although not yet
studied in a conversational context (although see de Vos et al.,
2015, this volume, for the parallel in signed conversation),
these measurements provide further estimates of the latencies
involved in language production. These latencies are perhaps
not surprising given the complexity of language encoding and
the need for the processes to be funneled into a single, serial
sequence of operations. Donders (1869) showed that reaction
time varies with the number of choices that need to be made,
and Hick’s Law (Hick, 1952) suggests this relation is generally
logarithmic (reaction time will increase with decision time,
where decision time T = log2 (n) and n is the number of equally

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 19

Levinson and Torreira

probable choices). When one considers that in production single
words have to be plucked from a word lexicon consisting of over
20,000 entries, one can see immediately the processing problems
involved. Combined with the relatively slow nature of nerve
conduction (known since Helmholtz, 1850), and the complexity
of the coordination of c. 100 muscles involved in articulation
(Levelt, 1989), slow reaction times can be expected.
To summarize, language production involves latencies of
well over half a second, and a multi-word utterance is likely
to involve a second or more of processing before articulation
begins. Although the conversational context may expedite some
of these processes, the bulk of this latency is attributed to the
phonological and phonetic encoding processes (as are frequency
effects, Jescheniak and Levelt, 1994) which are probably not
compressible.

6.4. Experimental Studies of Turn-Taking
There have been as yet relatively few experimental studies of
turn-taking, due to the difficulties involved in gaining sufficient
experimental control in free interaction. However, indirect
light has been thrown on the mechanisms by extracting turns
from conversation and experimentally testing when and how
participants detect turn ends. De Ruiter et al. (2006) extracted
turns from a corpus of conversations in Dutch, and got
participants to press a button in anticipation of turn endings.
They manipulated the turns so that there were versions where
pitch information was filtered out (No Pitch), where the words
were masked but the pitch preserved (No Words), where both
were filtered (No Pitch, No Words) and finally where amplitude
variation was also removed (Noise condition). They found
that accuracy of turn-end anticipation was preserved under
No Pitch, but significantly lost under No Words, and hugely
affected under the other conditions, and they claim that “The
conclusion is clear: lexicosyntactic structure is necessary (and
possibly sufficient) for accurate end-of-turn projection, while
intonational structure, perhaps surprisingly, is neither necessary
nor sufficient” (De Ruiter et al., 2006, p. 531).
This study suggested then that lexicon and syntax are the key
guide to turn-structure and completion. But there are aspects
of prosody and articulation that may be critical, and in the
normal case intonation may also be an important signal. To
test this, Bögels and Torreira (in press) used turns taken from
multiple scripted interviews, with questions like “So you’re a
student at Radboud University?” (long version) vs. “So you’re a
student?” (short version). The short versions exhibited a higher
maximum pitch and greater duration on the last syllable of the
word ‘student’ than the long versions, due to the presence of
an intonational phrase boundary at the end of this word in the
short questions, but not in the long questions. They cross-spliced
their materials in different ways, and did the same button-press
experiment as De Ruiter et al. (2006). Participants often false
alarmed (pressed the button) at ‘student’ when a phrase-final
word was cross-spliced into the middle of the long version –
they were clearly using the prosodic information to anticipate
turn closure. Participants were also presented with truncated
long sentences ending in a syntactic point of completion, but
lacking a final intonation phrase boundary: now participants

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

only reacted on average around 400 ms after the end of the
stimulus, suggesting that in this case participants’ button presses
were produced in reaction to silence. On the other hand, in
another condition consisting of similar words, but featuring a
final intonational boundary, RTs were around 100 ms on average,
suggesting reaction to or local prediction of an intonationally
well-formed question end. It should be noted that while pitch
had been filtered in the De Ruiter et al. (2006) study, duration
and other phonetic cues to prosodic structure were still present
in their filtered No Pitch condition. This new study shows that
participants do use prosodic cues to judge turn-ending. What
the de Ruiter et al. study does establish is that they need to be
integrated with the lexical/syntactic information to carry turnending indications.
There are other experimental techniques that can be used
to explore turn-taking. One is to use confederates (Bavelas and
Gerwing, 2011), another to use the visual world paradigm with
eye-tracking (Sjerps and Meyer, 2015). The latter study, using a
dual task paradigm, found that maximal interference in the nonlinguistic task occurred 500 ms before the end of the incoming
turn (see also Boiteau et al., 2014); however, the linguistic task
involved visual monitoring and was non-contingent with the
incoming turn, so was far removed from conversation.
A method that combines control with live interaction involves
alternating live and pre-recorded responses in such a way that
participants are unaware of the manipulation (Bögels et al., 2014).
In a recent study, we exploited this technique in a quiz-game
(Bögels et al., submitted). Participants were recorded for EEG in
a shielded room, and could not see the quiz master – this allowed
some of the interaction to be live, some pre-recorded. The quiz
questions were designed so that in some the answer was available
early, and that in others the answer was available only toward the
very end of the question, as in:
Which character, also called 007, appears in the famous movies?
(Early)
Which character from the famous movies, is also called 007? (Late).

In a second experiment, participants heard the same questions
but did not have to answer them. Instead, they only had to
remember them, as prompted by later probes. The neural patterns
were then compared with those in the first experiment, where
participants had to verbally respond, to the second where they
only had to comprehend and memorize. The results revealed a
clear neural signature associated with production, localized in
the appropriate areas, occurring within 500 ms of the point at
which a plausible answer to the question became available. Bögels
and colleagues interpreted this as showing that participants begin
planning their response as soon as they can, up to a second or
more before the incoming turn ends.

6.5. The Core Psycholinguistic Puzzle
From a psycholinguistic point of view, turn-taking presents
the following puzzle: in spite of the long latencies involved in
language production (600–1500 ms or more), participants often
manage to achieve smooth turn transitions (with the most typical
gaps as little as 100–300). As a solution to this puzzle, we suggest

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 20

Levinson and Torreira

that comprehension is predictive, even more so than is currently
thought. As soon as possible, participants extract the speech act
of the incoming utterance, which is the sine qua non for planning
their appropriate response. In order to overcome the production
latencies, they must also start the planning and encoding of the
response as soon as possible.
This suggests that there is a significant overlap of
comprehension and production processes. Given an average
turn (approximated as an interpausal unit in our Switchboard
Corpus data) of 1680 ms, somewhere in the middle response
preparation may already be underway. This provides a second
central puzzle: conversation involves constant double tasking,
and this double tasking uses the same language system. The
difficulty of the puzzle is increased when one takes into account
the findings that both comprehension and production use much
of the same neural circuitry (Segaert et al., 2011). It is plausible
that the difficulty here is overcome through rapid task switching,
and the gradual switch of resources from comprehension of the
incoming turn toward production of the response.
Pickering and Garrod (2013) outline a general model of
psycholinguistic processing, suggesting that production and
comprehension are intimately intermeshed. Just as generally
in action control, forward prediction of one’s own action is
performed to correct deviations, so in interaction forward
prediction of the other’s actions is used to check perception,
and aid preparation of response. This is a nice account, but
the complexities rapidly multiply. Listeners, on this account,
are both using their full comprehension system, and running
a fast simulation of the other’s production in order to predict
the outcome. Now, given the turn-taking facts established
above, we must add to this computational burden the need
to simultaneously prepare one’s own turn in advance involving
both the full production system and a hypothesized fast forward
predictor. So the poor listener who is about to respond has not
only the full comprehension and production processes running
simultaneously, but also two fast prediction systems (one for self,
one for other). This quadruple tasking looks unlikely, especially
as similar tasks are hard to multitask. Additional problems are
that unlike physical action prediction, which can be estimated by
a few heuristics, it is not clear how a fast approximate language
prediction system would be feasible especially in production –
producers have to grind through the syntax to find, e.g., what
order to put words in. More likely the real production system
may be involved minus the phonological and phonetic encoding,
which account for the bulk of the production latency.
In any case, regardless of how this is achieved, the
experimental and corpus studies reviewed in this section
converge in showing that participants in conversation often
anticipate the content of the others’ turns well in advance, and
that they use that information to prepare their response early.

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

observations and constraints, as originally noted by Sacks et al.
(1974, p. 700). We are now, however, able to add both additional
constraints and a certain amount of temporal precision to those
early observations:
(1) Turns are mostly short (mean 1680 ms, median 1227 ms; cf.
see Section 5.2.1), consisting of one or more interjections,
phrases or clauses at the syntactic level, and one or
more intonational units at the prosodic level. Turn ends
typically co-occur with points of both syntactic and prosodic
completion.
(2) Intra-speaker gaps are longer by c. 150 ms than inter-speaker
gaps (ten Bosch et al., 2005), suggesting ordered rules (the
rights to the next turn unit belong first to the next speaker,
and only if not exercised, to the current speaker).
(3) Inter-speaker gaps are most typically short, with modal values
for FTOs falling between 100 and 200 ms (cf. Figure 2).
Medium gaps and short overlaps are also common, although
less so than short gaps.
(4) Lengthy gaps (over 700 ms) may carry semiotic significance
(mostly, of an undesired or unexpected response; Kendrick
and Torreira, 2015), thus contributing to propel fast timing.
(5) Overlaps, though common, are brief (with a mean of 275 ms
at turn-transitions, and occupying less than 5% of the
spoken signal in our telephone calls data). Overlaps are more
common at turn transitions than within turns, and mostly
involve back-channels, simultaneous first-starts, disfluencies,
and other features predicted by Sacks et al. (1974).
(6) Turn-taking is established early in infancy, long before full
linguistic competence, which actually appears to slow down
response times; adult conversation timing is not achieved till
late in middle childhood.
(7) Given the latencies of speech production (over 600 ms),
incoming turns have to be predicted if accurate timing is to
be achieved. EEG recordings suggest the production process
in responsive turns starts as soon as the gist of the incoming
turn can be detected.
(8) Turn-final cues seem to be used to recognize that a turn
is definitely coming to an end. These cues are typically
prosodic (e.g., phrase-final syllable lengthening and specific
melodic patterns in many intonational languages) but also
syntactic (e.g., syntactic closure), and in principle could be of
other types too (e.g., gestural). In the appropriate pragmatic
context, these turn-final cues can trigger the decision of
the next speaker to articulate. From the point of view of
social interaction, it is effective articulation that constitutes a
point of no return (as opposed to other preparatory events
preceding speech, such as pre-utterance inhalations and
mouth noises).

7.1. The Standard Model and Alternatives

7. Models of Turn-taking
Let us now gather together how the observations and inferences
discussed above constrain viable models of turn-taking.
Any adequate model must be consistent with a number of

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

We have outlined above the Sacks et al. (1974) model of turntaking as an opportunity-based or sharing system, regulated by
normative rules. The behavioral patterns on this account are the
outcome of joint, coordinated determination of turns, against a
background of an assumption of rights to minimal turns. Not all

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 21

Levinson and Torreira

turns are minimal of course, but in this case a bid must be made
for an extended turn, as in:
(9) Terasaki, 1976, p. 53
D: I forgot to tell you the two best things that happen’ to me
today.
R: Oh super=What were they?
D: I got a B+ on my math test ((material omitted)) and I got
an athletic award.
An alternative model is the turn-end signaling system
proposed by Duncan (1972), also mentioned above, under which
the system is wholly in the control of the current speaker, who
has exclusive rights and signals transfer at the end of the turn. In
contrast, Sacks et al. (1974) held that “It is misconceived to treat
turns as units characterized by a division of labor in which the
speaker determines units and boundaries,” instead, “the turn as a
unit is interactively determined.”
Duncan (1972, p. 286) proposed a simple rule of the sort
“The auditor may take his speaking turn when the speaker gives
a turn-yielding signal.” Such a system would be in effect like
the “over and out” cuing at the end of turns on a two-way
(half duplex) radio which permits hearing or talking but not
both at once by a single party. Such a system predicts that
overlap can only occur when “over” cues are mistakenly given
or overridden; the large incidence of overlaps in corpora, and
their clustering at principled locations (like overlapped tags or
address forms) is then hard to reconcile with such a model.
As mentioned, the model presumed that these turn-yielding
signals such as intonation are context-independent, but in fact
we know they are not – e.g., in English final rising intonation in
a question may signal finality but in a statement continuation;
thus their interpretation would have to be embedded in complex
comprehension processes. The model is in any case very partial:
it tells us nothing about how or why people should initiate a turn,
why turns are generally short, how multiple participants can be
integrated into a single conversation, how overlap is resolved, and
so forth. But it may add a component to a more complex overall
model.

7.2. Toward an Adequate Psycholinguistic
Model of Turn Taking – Cognitive
Processes in the Responder1
We believe that the property list in Section 7 above puts fairly
narrow constraints on a possible model of turn-taking. One
area of particular interest is the temporal constraints that turntaking imposes on language processing, given that conversational
interchange is the core form of language use. These constraints
are funneled into one crucial link in the system, namely, the
current addressee preparing to respond. Here we consider the
cognitive processes that must be involved.
The crucial questions concern what factors govern the
decision making process that lies behind the initiation and timing
1 The ideas presented in this section were developed in collaboration with Mathias
Barthel, Sara Bögels, and the other members of the INTERACT project at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. See also Section 5.3 in Heldner and Edlund
(2010) for a parallel proposal.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

of response. While turn-final cues in the incoming turn seem
likely to play a role, they cannot be sufficient given the long
latencies in language planning and production. To overcome
these long latencies, predictive comprehension must be involved,
together with a strategy of early beginnings to production. Bögels
et al. (submitted) suggest that production begins as soon as it
can – that is, as soon as the speech act content of the incoming
turn is clear. This implies of course dual-tasking, perhaps by
rapid alternation (‘time sharing’). A new study using a dual-task
paradigm and eye-tracking suggests that the heaviest interference
is rather late (Sjerps and Meyer, 2015), and tied to looking-forspeaking which was postponed in this task toward the end of the
incoming turn. Both early and late processes are almost certainly
involved, but what exactly is happening, and when during natural
conversation remains to be determined.
The flowchart diagram in Figure 3 sketches the cognitive
processes that must minimally be at work in the recipient
of a typical turn at talk during conversation. Predictive
comprehension is underway early, and already by half way
through more predictable turns will suggest a temporal envelope
for completion (Magyari et al., 2014). If so, morphosyntax may
provide most of the early clues to the overall structural envelope
(e.g., turns beginning with if or either or whenever projects a
two clause structure), so offering some long distance projection.
Within the last half second or so, the actual words will often be
predicted (Magyari and de Ruiter, 2012), and, within that same
late time-frame, cues to imminent turn closure, usually prosodic
and phonetic, are likely to appear (Local and Walker, 2012; Bögels
and Torreira, in press), indicating a likely turn end.
A recipient’s first task is to identify or predict the speech
act or action being carried out – both the illocutionary force
and the likely propositional content. In cases in which the
illocutionary force of the incoming utterance makes a floor
exchange relevant or due, production planning may begin as
soon as it is recognized, as suggested by the results in Bögels
et al. (submitted). Production is, at least in the latter stages,
serial, and proceeds through conceptualization, lemma retrieval,
phonological retrieval, and phonetic encoding, following a time
course that seems well understood (Indefrey, 2011), extending
600–1200 ms or more before articulation depending on the ease
of retrieval and the length of the turn. In this model, early
preparation is assumed, but actual articulation is held till turnfinal cues (e.g., upcoming syntactic closure, a non-turn-keeping
intonational phrase boundary) are detected, whereupon actual
articulation is launched. Assuming these cues fall in the last halfsecond of the incoming turn, reaction to those will be sufficient
to launch pre-prepared material so that it appears soon after the
other’s turn is completed.
Figure 3 sketches the kind of interaction between
comprehension and production processes that must be
involved in a typical turn transition (i.e., involving a FTO
of c. 200 ms). There is an early gist comprehension with speech
act apprehension sent as soon as possible to the production
conceptualizer (see Levinson, 2013; Gisladottir et al., 2015).
The production system may automatically begin to formulate
right down to the phonology (Bögels et al., submitted), but with
the actual articulation held in a buffer until the comprehension

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 22

Levinson and Torreira

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

FIGURE 3 | Sketch of the interleaving of comprehension and production in the recipient of an incoming turn.

system signals an imminent completion of the incoming turn.
Prior to that signal, it is likely that pre-articulation preparation
(requiring c. 200 ms) of the vocal apparatus would be underway –
this would include readying the vocal tract for the gestures to
be made (see Drake et al., 2014; Schaeffler et al., 2014), and the
decision to inhale prior to delivery of longer responses (Torreira
et al., 2015, this volume).
Meanwhile the comprehension system continues to check the
incoming signal for possible closure at both the syntactic and
prosodic level. As soon as there are consistent signals of linguistic
completion, a go-signal is sent to production, and any buffered
articulation released. It is likely that visual monitoring of gesture
can also be utilized for the go-signal (Duncan, 1974), but this
awaits experimental confirmation.
This model is responsive to all the constraints listed in
Section 7. What this model crucially adds is:
(a) an account of how responders can often respond with short
latencies despite the long latencies of the production system;
(b) why the corpus statistical results reliably show a modal
response with positive offsets of around 100–300 ms,
reflecting the reaction time to the turn-final prosodic cues
in the incoming turn (i.e., reaction to the go-signal, as
hypothesized by Heldner and Edlund, 2010).
The model sketch in Figure 3 is based on average, modal,
and minimal temporal latencies reported in the literature. We
would like to propose that this model is generally valid in the
most frequent scenarios. If speakers launched their responses as
early as they could without waiting for turn-final cues, we should
expect overlapping or no-gap–no-overlap transitions to be the
most common, rather than a short gap. And, if speakers typically
launched language planning only after identifying turn-final cues,
we should expect the most frequent transition times to involve at
least half a second or more rather than short gaps of 100–300 ms.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

The model therefore captures the most typical turn transition
values observed in conversational corpora.
What, however, accounts for the significant number of overlap
and long gap cases observable in any conversation? A reviewer
suggests that human factors such as lack of attention, preformulated agendas, and apparent involvement with actual
minimal responsiveness may all be involved, and notes that
apparent good timing may be achieved with buffers like particles.
However, the evidence is that conversation is generally more
demanding than that – for example 95% of questions get answers
(Stivers, 2010), and particles like well and uhm in English
are semiotically loaded and thus not empty buffers (Kendrick
and Torreira, 2015), while Roberts et al. (2015) failed to find
statistical differences in the timing of turns with and without
such particles. In addition, it is likely that speakers sometimes
use other turn-taking than the one sketched in Figure 3. For
example, under competition for the floor, or when responding
to highly predictable utterances, speakers may decide to launch
articulation without waiting to identify turn-final cues. In cases of
long transition latencies, speakers may not have been able to plan
the initial stages of their turn early enough to launch articulation
when the interlocutor’s turn-final cues become available. This
may indeed be due to a low attentional level on the part of the
speaker, or to the interlocutor’s turn being unclear in purpose
until its end or simply to the complexity of the response required
(Torreira et al., 2015, this volume).

8. Conclusion
This overview of work on turn-taking behavior over the
last half century shows that turn-taking is a remarkable
phenomenon, for it combines high temporal coordination
between participants with the remarkable complexity and openendedness of the language that fills the turns. The tension
between these two properties is reflected in the development

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 23

Levinson and Torreira

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

of turn-taking in childhood (Proto-Conversation’ and Turn
Taking in Human Development), and it poses a substantial puzzle
for psycholinguistic models (i.e., dual-tasking comprehension
and production processes), which until recently have completely
ignored this, the most central form of language use.

Acknowledgment

References

Donders, F. C. (1869). “On the speed of mental processes,” in Attention &
Performance II, ed. and trans. W. G. Koster (Amsterdam: North-Holland),
412–431.
Drake, E., Schaeffler, S., and Corley, M. (2014). “Articulatory effects of
prediction during comprehension: an ultrasound tongue imaging approach,” in
Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar on Speech Production, Cologne.
Draper, M. H., Ladefoged, P., and Whitteridge, D. (1960). Expiratory pressures and
air flow during speech. Br. Med. J. 1, 1837–1843. doi: 10.1136/bmj.1.5189.1837
Drew, P. (2013). “Turn Design,” in Handbook of Conversation Analysis, eds T.
Stivers and J. Sidnell (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), 131–149.
Duncan, S. D. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in
conversation. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 23, 283–292. doi: 10.1037/h0033031
Duncan, S. D. (1974). On the structure of speaker-auditor interaction during
speaking turns. Lang. Soc. 2, 161–180. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500004322
Fernald, A., Zangl, R., Portillo, A. L., and Marchman, V. A. (2008). “Looking while
listening: using eye movements to monitor spoken language comprehension
by infants and young children,” in Developmental Psycholinguistics: On-line
Methods in Children’s Language Processing, eds I. A. Sekerina, E. M. Fernandez,
and H. Clahsen (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 97–135. doi: 10.1075/lald.44.
06fer
Ford, C. E., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). “Interactional units in conversation:
syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the projection of turn
completion,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S. A.
Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 135–184.
Fry, D. B. (1975). Simple reaction-times to speech and non-speech stimuli. Cortex
11, 355–360. doi: 10.1016/S0010-9452(75)80027-X
Garvey, C., and Berninger, G. (1981). Timing and turn-taking in children’s
conversations. Discourse Process. 4, 27–57. doi: 10.1080/01638538109544505
Gisladottir, R., Chwilla, D., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). Conversation electrified:
ERP correlates of speech act recognition in underspecified utterances. PLoS
ONE 10:e0120068. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120068
Gleitman, L. R., January, D., Nappa, R., and Trueswell, J. C. (2007). On the give and
take between event apprehension and utterance formulation. J. Mem. Lang. 57,
544–596. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2007.01.007
Godfrey, J., Holliman, E., and McDaniel, J. (1992). “SWITCHBOARD: telephone
speech corpus for research and development,” in Proceedings of the
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
(ICASSP) (San Francisco, CA: IEEE), 517–520. doi: 10.1109/icassp.1992.
225858
Goodwin, C. (1980). Restarts, pauses, and the achievement of mutual gaze at
turn-beginning. Soc. Inq. 50, 272–302. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00023.x
Gravano, A., and Hirschberg, J. (2009). “Backchannel-inviting cues in task-oriented
dialogue,” in Proceedings of SigDial 2009, London, 253–261.
Griffin, Z. M., and Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychol. Sci.
4, 274–279. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00255
Hayashi, M. (2013). “Turn allocation and turn sharing,” in Handbook of
Conversation Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Chichester: WileyBlackwell), 167–190.
Heldner, M. (2011). Detection thresholds for gaps, overlaps and no-gap-nooverlaps. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, 508–513. doi: 10.1121/1.3598457
Heldner, M., and Edlund, J. (2010). Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations.
J. Phon. 38, 555–568. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2010.08.002
Helmholtz, H. (1850). “Vorläufiger Bericht Über die FortpflanzungsGeschwindigkeit der Nervenreizung,” in Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie
und wissenschaftliche Medicin (Berlin: Veit & Comp.), 71–73.
Hick, W. E. (1952). On the rate of gain of information. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 4, 11–26.
doi: 10.1080/17470215208416600
Indefrey, P. (2011). The spatial and temporal signatures of word
production components: a critical update. Front. Psychol. 2:255. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00255

Altmann, G., and Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs:
restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition 73, 247–264. doi:
10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00059-1
Bates, E., D’Amico, S., Jacobsen, T., Székely, A., Andonova, E., Devescovi, A.,
et al. (2003). Timed picture naming in seven languages. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 10,
344–380. doi: 10.3758/BF03196494
Bateson, M. C. (1975). Mother-infant exchanges: the epigenesis of conversational
interaction. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 263, 101–113. doi: 10.1111/j.17496632.1975.tb41575.x
Bavelas, J. B., and Gerwing, J. (2011). The listener as addressee in face-to-face
dialogue. Int. J. Listening 25, 178–198. doi: 10.1080/10904018.2010.508675
Beebe, B., Alson, D., Jaffe, J., Feldstein, S., and Crown, C. (1988). Vocal congruence
in mother-infant play. J. Psychol. Res. 17, 245–259. doi: 10.1007/BF01686358
Bögels, S., Barr, D., Garrod, S., and Kessler, K. (2014). Conversational interaction
in the scanner: mentalizing during language processing as revealed by MEG.
Cereb. Cortex doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhu116 [Epub ahead of print].
Bögels, S., and Torreira, F. (in press). Listeners use intonational phrase boundaries
to project turn ends in spoken interaction. J. Phonet.
Boiteau, T. W., Malone, P. S., Peters, S. A., and Almor, A. (2014). Interference
between conversation and a concurrent visuomotor task. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.
143, 295–311. doi: 10.1037/a0031858
Brady, P. T. (1968). A statistical analysis of on-off patterns in 16 conversations. Bell
Sys. Tech. J. 47, 73–91. doi: 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1968.tb00031.x
Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s Talk. New York, NY: Norton.
Buck, J., and Buck, E. (1976). ‘Synchronous fireflies’. Sci. Am. 234, 74–85. doi:
10.1038/scientificamerican0576-74
Byrd, D. (1993). 54,000 American stops. UCLA Work. Papers Phon. 83, 97–116.
Calhoun, S., Carletta, J., and Brenier, J. M. (2010). The NXT-format switchboard
corpus: a rich resource for investigating the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and
prosody of dialogue. Lang. Resour. Eval. 44, 387–419. doi: 10.1007/s10579-0109120-1
Calvert, D. R. (1986). Descriptive Phonetics, 2nd Edn. New York, NY: Thieme
Medical Publisher.
Casillas, M. (2014). “Taking the floor on time: delay and deferral in children’s turn
taking,” in Language in Interaction: Studies in Honor of Eve V. Clark, eds I.
Arnon, M. Casillas, C. Kurumada, and B. Estigarribia (Amsterdam: Benjamins),
101–114. doi: 10.1075/tilar.12.09cas
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2013). “The development of predictive processes in
children’s discourse understanding,” in Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting
of the Cognitive Science Society, eds M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, and I.
Wachsmuth (Austin, TX: Cognitive Society), 299–304.
Clayman, S. (2013). “Turn-constructional units and the transition-relevance place,”
in Handbook of Conversation Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell), 151–166.
Chomsky, N. (1969). “Quine’s Empirical Assumptions,” in Words and Objections,
eds D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel), 53–68. doi: 10.1007/97894-010-1709-1_5
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2009). “Relatedness and timing in talk-in-interaction,” in
Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics, eds D. Barth-Weingarten, N. Dehé, and
A. Wichmann (Leiden: Brill), 257–276. doi: 10.1163/9789004253223_012
Crystal, T., and House, A. (1988). Segmental durations in connected-speech
signals: current results. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 83, 1553–1573. doi: 10.1121/1.395911
De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
de Vos, C., Torreira, F., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). Turn-timing in signed
conversations: coordinating stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries. Front. Psychol.
6:268. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00268

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

This research was financed by the ERC Advanced grant
#269484 INTERACT and by the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 24

Levinson and Torreira

Indefrey, P., and Levelt, W. J. M. (2004). The spatial and temporal
signatures of word production components. Cognition 92, 101–144. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2002.06.001
Ito, K., and Speer, S. R. (2008). Anticipatory effects of intonation: eye
movements during instructed visual search. J. Mem. Lang. 58, 541–573. doi:
10.1016/j.jml.2007.06.013
Izdebski, K., and Shipp, T. (1978). Minimal reaction times for phonatory initiation.
J. Speech Hear. Res. 21, 638–651. doi: 10.1044/jshr.2104.638
Jasnow, M., and Feldstein, S. (1986). Adult-like temporal characteristics of
mother-infant vocal interactions. Child Dev. 57, 754–761. doi: 10.2307/11
30352
Jefferson, G. (1984). “Notes on some orderliness of overlap onset,” in Discourse
Analysis and Natural Rhetoric, eds V. D’Urso and P. Leonardi (Padua: Cleup
Editore), 11–38.
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on ‘latency’ in overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.
doi: 10.1007/BF00148125
Jescheniak, J. D., and Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Word frequency effects in speech
production: retrieval of syntactic information and of phonological form. J. Exp.
Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 20, 824–843. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.20.4.824
Kamide, Y., Altmann, G. T. M., and Haywood, S. L. (2003). The time-course
of prediction in incremental sentence processing: evidence from anticipatory
eye movements. J. Mem. Lang. 49, 133–156. doi: 10.1016/S0749-596X(03)
00023-8
Keitel, A., Prinz, W., Friederici, A. D., von Hofsten, C., and Daum, M. M.
(2013). Perception of conversations: the importance of semantics and
intonation in children’s development. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 116, 264–277. doi:
10.1016/j.jecp.2013.06.005
Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta
Psychol. 26, 22–63. doi: 10.1016/0001-6918(67)90005-4
Kendrick, K., and Torreira, F. (2015). The timing and construction of
preference: a quantitative study. Discourse Process. 52, 255–289. doi: 10.1080/
0163853X.2014.955997
Kutas, M., DeLong, K. A., and Smith, N. J. (2011). “A look around at what lies
ahead: prediction and predictability in language processing,” in Predictions in
the Brain: Using our Past to Generate a Future, ed. M. Bar (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), 190–207.
Lerner, G. H. (1991). On the syntax of sentences in progress. Lang. Soc. 20, 441–458.
doi: 10.1017/S0047404500016572
Lerner, G. H. (2002). “Turn-sharing: the choral co-production of talk-ininteraction,” in The Language of Turn and Sequence, eds C. Ford, B. Fox, and
S. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 225–256.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. (2000). Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levinson, S. (2013). Recursion in pragmatics. Language 89, 149–162. doi:
10.1353/lan.2013.0005
Local, J., and Walker, G. (2012). How phonetic features project more talk. J. Int.
Phon. Assoc. 42, 255–280. doi: 10.1017/S0025100312000187
Magyari, L., Bastiaansen, M. C. M., De Ruiter, J. P., and Levinson, S. C. (2014).
Early anticipation lies behind the speed of response in conversation. J. Cogn.
Neurosci. 26, 2530–2539. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00673
Magyari, L., and de Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based
on anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00376
McFarland, D. H. (2001). Respiratory markers of conversational interaction.
J. Speech Lang. Hear Res. 44, 128–143. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2001/012)
Mehl, M. R., Vazire, S., Ramírez-Esparza, N., Slatcher, R. B., and Pennebaker,
J. W. (2007). Are women really more talkative than men? Science 317, 82. doi:
10.1126/science.1139940
Mehler, J., Sebastian, N., Altmann, G., Christophe, A., and Pallier, C. (1993).
Understanding compressed sentences: the role of rhythm and meaning.
Paper presented at the Temporal information processing in the nervous
system. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 682, 272–282. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1993.tb
22975.x
Munhall, K., Gribble, P., Sacco, L., and Ward, M. (1996). Temporal constraints on
the McGurk effect. Percept. Psychophys. 58, 351–362. doi: 10.3758/BF03206811

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

Norcliffe, E., Konopka, A., Brown, P., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). Word order
affects the time-course of sentence formulation in Tzeltal. Lang. Cogn. Neurosci.
doi: 10.1080/23273798.2015.1006238
Norwine, A. C., and Murphy, O. J. (1938). Characteristic time intervals in
telephonic conversation. Bell Syst. Tech. J. 17, 281–291. doi: 10.1002/j.15387305.1938.tb00432.x
Pickering, M. J., and Garrod, S. (2013). An integrated theory of language
production and comprehension. Behav. Brain Sci. 36, 329–347. doi:
10.1017/S0140525X12001495
Pomerantz, A., and Heritage, J. (2013). “Preference,” in Handbook of Conversation
Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), 210–228.
Riest, C., Jorschick, A. B., and De Ruiter, J. P. (2015). Anticipation in turntaking: mechanisms and information sources. Front. Psychol. 6:89. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00089
Roberts, F., Margutti, P., and Takano, S. (2011). Judgments concerning the
valence of inter-turn silence across speakers of American English, Italian,
and Japanese. Discourse Process. 48, 331–354. doi: 10.1080/0163853X.2011.
558002
Roberts, S. G., Torreira, F., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). The effects of processing
and sequence organization on the timing of turn taking: a corpus study. Front.
Psychol. 6:509. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00509
Rossano, F. (2013). “Gaze in conversation,” in Handbook of Conversation Analysis,
eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), 308–329.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.1353/lan.1974.0010
Schaeffler, S., Scobbie, J. M., and Schaeffler, F. (2014). “Measuring reaction times:
vocalisation vs. articulation,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar
on Speech Production, Cologne.
Schegloff, E. A. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for
conversation. Lang. Soc. 29, 1–63. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500001019
Schnur, T. T., Costa, A., and Caramazza, A. (2006). Planning at the phonological
level during sentence production. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 35, 189–213. doi:
10.1007/s10936-005-9011-6
Sebanz, N., and Knoblich, G. K. (2008). “From mirroring to joint action,” in
Embodied Communication, eds I. Wachsmuth, M. Lenzen, and G. K. Knoblich
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 129–150.
Segaert, K., Menenti, L., Weber, K., and Hagoort, P. (2011). A paradox of
syntactic priming: why response tendencies show priming for passives,
and response latencies show priming for actives. PLoS ONE 6:e24209. doi:
10.1371/journal.pone.0024209
Sellen, A. J. (1995). Remote conversations: the effects of mediating
talk with technology. Hum. Comput. Interact. 10, 401–444. doi:
10.1207/s15327051hci1004_2
Shipp, T., Izdebski, K., and Morrissey, P. (1984). Physiologic stages of vocal
reaction time. J. Speech Hear. Res. 27, 173–178. doi: 10.1044/jshr.2702.173
Sjerps, M., and Meyer, A. (2015). Variation in dual-task performance reveals
late initiation of speech planning in turn-taking. Cognition 136, 304–324. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2014.10.008
Stivers, T. (2010). An overview of the question-response system in
American English conversation. J. Pragmatics 42, 2772–2781. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.011
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., and Levinson, S. C. (2010). Question-response sequences
in conversation across ten languages: an introduction. J. Pragmatics 42, 2615–
2619. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.001
ten Bosch, L., Oostdijk, N., and Boves, L. (2005). On temporal aspects of
turn-taking in conversational dialogues. Speech Commun. 47, 80–86. doi:
10.1016/j.specom.2005.05.009
ten Bosch, L., Oostdijk, N., and de Ruiter, J. P. (2004). “Turn-taking in social
talk dialogues: temporal, formal, and functional aspects,” in Proceedings of the
Ninth Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2004), Saint-Petersburg:
St.Petersburg, 454–461.
Terasaki, A. (1976). Pre-announcement Sequences in Conversation (No. 99). Irvine,
CA: University of Irvine, Social Sciences.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 25

Levinson and Torreira

Tice, M., and Henetz, T. (2011). “Turn-boundary projection: looking ahead,” in
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, eds
L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, and T. Shipley (Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society),
838–843.
Torreira, F., Bögels, S., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). Breathing for answering: the
time course of response planning in conversation. Front. Psychol. 6:284. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00284
Trevarthen, C. (1977). “Descriptive analyses of infant communicative behaviour,”
in Studies in Mother-Infant Interaction, ed. H. R. Schaffer (London: Academic
Press), 89–117.
Walker, G. (2013). “Phonetics and prosody in conversation,” in Handbook
of Conversation Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Chichester: WileyBlackwell), 455–474.
Weilhammer, K., and Rabold, S. (2003). “Durational aspects in turn taking,” in
Proceedings of the International Conference of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona.
Wells, B., and Macfarlane, S. (1998). Prosody as an interactional
resource: turn-projection and overlap. Lang. Speech 41, 265–294. doi:
10.1177/002383099804100403
Wheeldon, L. R., and Levelt, W. J. M. (1995). Monitoring the time-course of
phonological encoding. J. Mem. Lang. 34, 311–334. doi: 10.1006/jmla.1995.1014

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing in turn-taking and psycholinguistics

Wilson, M., and Wilson, T. P. (2005). An oscillator model of the timing
of turn-taking. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 12, 957–968. doi: 10.3758/BF032
06432
Wilson, T. P., and Zimmerman, D. H. (1986). The structure of silence
between turns in two-party conversation. Discourse Process. 9, 375–390. doi:
10.1080/01638538609544649
Yngve, V. H. (1970). On getting a word in edgewise. Papers from the Sixth
Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic
Society.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Levinson and Torreira. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use,
distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal
is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 26

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY
published: 11 June 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00751

The use of content and timing to
predict turn transitions
Simon Garrod 1* and Martin J. Pickering 2
1
Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK, 2 Department of Psychology, University of
Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Edited by:
Judith Holler,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Nai Ding,
New York University, USA
Alex Fine,
Hebrew University, Israel
*Correspondence:
Simon Garrod,
Institute of Neuroscience and
Psychology, University of Glasgow, 58
Hillhead Street,
Glasgow G12 8YR, UK
simon.garrod@glasgow.ac.uk
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 29 October 2014
Accepted: 20 May 2015
Published: 11 June 2015
Citation:
Garrod S and Pickering MJ (2015) The
use of content and timing to predict
turn transitions. Front. Psychol. 6:751.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00751

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

For addressees to respond in a timely fashion, they cannot simply process the speaker’s
utterance as it occurs and wait till it finishes. Instead, they predict both when the
speaker will conclude and what linguistic forms will be used. While doing this, they must
also prepare their own response. To explain this, we draw on the account proposed
by Pickering and Garrod (2013a), in which addressees covertly imitate the speaker’s
utterance and use this to determine the intention that underlies their upcoming utterance.
They use this intention to predict when and how the utterance will end, and also to
drive their own production mechanisms for preparing their response. Following Arnal and
Giraud (2012), we distinguish between mechanisms that predict timing and content. In
particular, we propose that the timing mechanism relies on entrainment of low-frequency
oscillations between speech envelope and brain. This constrains the context that feeds
into the determination of the speaker’s intention and hence the timing and form of the
upcoming utterance. This approach typically leads to well-timed contributions, but also
provides a mechanism for resolving conflicts, for example when there is unintended
speaker overlap.
Keywords: dialog, turn-taking, prediction, timing, content

Introduction
How is it possible for most conversations to be so fluent and efficient? Interlocutors tend to respond
coherently and appropriately to each other. But in addition, they do so in good time—they do not
leave long gaps between contributions, nor do they speak simultaneously for more than a brief
moment (Sacks et al., 1974). To understand this remarkable and almost universal ability for turn
transitions, we need to explain the cognitive processes that take place in people’s minds. So far,
psychologists have developed detailed accounts of the moment-by-moment processes that underlie
producing and comprehending in isolation, but have much less to say about the moment-bymoment processes involved in conversation. In this paper, we propose an account of those processes
that specifically explains turn transitions.

The Nature of Turn Transitions
We begin with an example from Schegloff (1996, p. 73). Two students are talking on the phone
about a book purchase, with [ indicating overlapping speech, and numbers indicating noticeable
pauses in seconds)1,2 .

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 27

Garrod and Pickering

1.
Bee: I’nna tell you on:e course.
(0.5)
Ava: [(
).]
Bee: [(The mah- ] the mah:dern art. The twunnieth century
a:rt
there’s about eight books,
Ava: Mm[hm,
Bee:
[En I wen tuh buy a book the other day I [went ]
‘bh went=
Ava:
[(mm)]
Bee: =down tuh N.Y.U. tuh get it becuz it’s the only place
thet
car[ries the book
Ava:
[Mmm
Ava: Mmh
Bee: Tch! En it wz twun::ty do::lliz.
Ava: Oh my god.
(0.4)
Bee: Yeuh he-ez he wz handing me the book en ’etol’ me
twunny
dolliz I almos’ dro(h)pped i(h)[t ‘hh ‘hh
Ava:
[thhunh.
Bee: ‘hhh I said but fer twunny dollars I bettuh hh ‘hh
yihknow,
(0.2)
Bee: ‘hhh h[hold o:nto i(h)hh] huhh huh] ‘hh!
Ava:
[not drop
it. ] huhh huh]
(0.2)
Bee: Ih wz, (0.2) y’know (fun).=...
It is quite clear that the interlocutors contribute sequentially.
On the one hand, any pauses are very short, but on the other,
there is little overlap. In most cases, the overlap is not likely
to interfere with comprehension, because people are able to
1 Transcription

conventions for the original examples in our paper are as follows:
(.) indicates brief pause; [ indicates overlap; : indicates lengthening; .hh indicates
long inhalation; (=) at the end of one line and the beginning of the next
indicate that the speech is continuous; ( ) indicates that the speech here was
unintelligible to the transcriber. Speech between >XXX< is more compressed in
pace, speech between <XXX> is more stretched out in pace. Upper case indicates
unusually loud speech. In some cases we have added bold font for illustrative
purposes.
2 A more literal rendition of this exchange is:
Bee: I’m going to tell you about one course. The modern art – the twentieth century
art – there’s about eight books.
Ava: mm
Bee: And I went to buy a book the other day –
Ava: mm
Bee: went down-town to NYU to get it because it’s the only place that carries the
book.
Ava: mm
Bee: And it was twenty dollars.
Ava: Oh my god.
Bee: Yeah he was handing me the book and he told me twenty dollars. I almost
dropped it Ava: huh
Bee: I said for twenty dollars I better you knowBee: hold onto it
Ava: Not drop it
Bee: I was - you know. . . .

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

speak and comprehend “backchannel” contributions such as mm
(or listen and produce such contributions) at the same time.
Somehow, the addressee must be able to know when to speak and
when to be quiet, even though she does not know exactly what
her partner is going to say.
Conversation analysts have very carefully analyzed
what people do during conversations such as these (i.e.,
rather than highly ritualized or formulaic interchanges).
Among other observations, Sacks et al. (1974, pp. 700–701)
noted:
(a) Overwhelmingly, one party talks at a time.
(b) Occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are common,
but brief.
(c) Transitions (from one turn to the next) with no gap
and no overlap are common. Together with transitions
characterized by slight gap or slight overlap, they make up
the vast majority of transitions.
(d) Turn size is not fixed, but varies.
(e) What parties say is not specified in advance.
(f) Turn-allocation techniques are obviously used. A current
speaker may select a next speaker (as when he addresses
a question to another party); or parties may self-select in
starting to talk.
(g) Repair mechanisms exist for dealing with turn-taking errors
and violations; e.g., if two parties find themselves talking
at the same time, one of them will stop prematurely, thus,
repairing the trouble.
All of these observations are clearly relevant for the above
example. Our goal is to explain such observations in cognitivepsychological terms. Our focus is on (c), and to some extent
(b), (f), and (g). One important reason for (a) is presumably
basic limitations on processing resources (it is very hard to
produce and comprehend different messages at the same time).
Observations (d) and (e) occur because conversations are
generally unplanned and because people’s goals vary (they may
want to make small or large contributions) and may be affected
by the conversation itself.
Sacks et al.’s (1974) work is based on English. Stivers et al.
(2009) compared turn transitions for questions and responses
across speakers of 10 diverse languages and found slight variation
in distribution. But in all cases the most frequent interval
was between 0 and 200 ms. In other words, conversationalists
show a strong disposition to avoid overlap and to minimize
silence between turns. They concluded that these properties
of conversation constitute robust human universals (though
cultural and linguistic factors lead to minor variations). So how is
it possible for interlocutors to contribute with such short intervals
between turns, while avoiding extensive overlap? How can the
addressee prepare and execute an appropriate response while
comprehending the speaker?

The Processes Underlying Turn Transition
Given such intervals, addressees cannot simply wait for the
speaker to end before preparing their response. First, it would of
course take some time to determine that the speaker has ended.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 28

Garrod and Pickering

Second, many studies have demonstrated that producing a single
word requires about 175 ms to access meaning, 75 ms for syntax,
205 ms for phonology, and 145 ms for phonetic encoding and
articulation (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004; see Sahin et al., 2009,
for somewhat different estimates). Even if these timings might
be slightly different in conversation (rather than, for example,
picture naming), it is clear that, in general, addressees must be
able to estimate when the speaker’s turn will end and begin
response preparation several hundred milliseconds before that
point.
This suggests that comprehension and production processes
must be tightly interwoven. In fact, this assumption is quite
controversial within the psychology of language, which tends
to have studied comprehension and production in isolation
and assumes that they involve largely independent mechanisms
(Pickering and Garrod, 2013a). According to traditional
accounts, dialog therefore can be characterized as serial monolog,
in which the speaker produces and the addressee listens, and at
the turn-transition point (i.e., transition relevance place) they
switch roles and processes.
In fact, the serial monolog account suggests that speakers
cannot prepare their utterances until they realize that their
partner has completed (which may be later than the actual
completion point). This would obviously be incompatible
with Sacks et al. (1974) and Stivers et al. (2009). To avoid
these problems, comprehenders would have to use ancillary
mechanisms based on their comprehension systems to predict
turn completions. These mechanisms would not be relevant for
production, so they would have to begin preparing a response
using their production systems in parallel to comprehensionbased prediction. Moreover, they would have to determine the
meaning of the complete utterance and then use this as a basis
for generating an appropriate response.
These problems are, however, avoided if comprehenders use
their production systems to make predictions and prepare their
responses together. The mechanisms that they use to predict
a speaker’s final word, for example, are closely related to the
mechanisms they themselves use to produce their response—
or indeed to complete their partner’s utterance if necessary
(e.g., to help with word finding difficulty; A: That tree has,
uh, uh . . . B: tentworms; Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986, p. 6).
We now (1) specify the problem faced by the addressee; (2)
discuss how addressees use predictions of timing and content
to predict when the speaker will complete; and (3) discuss
how the addressee can produce an appropriate and timely
response.

Managing Fluent Turn-Transition Requires
Predicting Both Speech Content and
Timing
The addressee has to predict when the speaker is going to finish,
and prepare an appropriate response. It would not be sufficient
to prepare a response without predicting the end-point, because
studies have shown that producing a prepared linguistic response
to a cue takes several hundred milliseconds. For example, Ferreira

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

(1991) had participants memorize and then produce sentences
following a cue, and found response times of 500 ms or more.
It takes at least as long to initiate prepared picture naming
(e.g., Piai et al., 2011). Similarly, simply predicting the endpoint would merely remove any time needed to determine
that the speaker had ended, but not help with response
preparation.
In fact, De Ruiter et al. (2006) showed that listeners could
accurately estimate when a speaker’s conversational turn was
about to end. Their participants heard turns taken from
recordings of natural conversations and indicated precisely when
they thought the turn would end. The average response was about
186 ms before the turn actually ended. Interestingly, turn-ending
estimates were not affected by flattening the pitch contour of the
speech, but were dramatically affected when the lexico/semantic
content was removed. This suggests that listeners used the
content to predict turn endings. It is of course possible that
other sources of prosodic information might affect estimates; for
example, future investigations could test whether addressees are
sensitive to rising intonation when responding to a question. In
a subsequent study, Magyari and De Ruiter (2012) had another
group of listeners predict the remaining words in De Ruiter
et al.’s turn fragments. They found turn-end judgments were
more precise when those listeners made accurate predictions than
when they did not. An obvious explanation of these findings is
that people’s predictions of words constitute a factor (alongside
speech rate) that is used to predict turn endings.
Experimental studies have shown that people predict aspects
of upcoming words such as their syntactic features (e.g., Van
Berkum et al., 2005) and their sound (e.g., DeLong et al., 2005),
and that they also predict upcoming constituent structure (Staub
and Clifton, 2006). Indeed, many theoretical accounts assume
that comprehension is an inherently predictive process (Hale,
2001; Levy, 2008). We therefore propose that people can draw
on local predictions of words and other linguistic information to
predict turn endings.
It may also be possible to make predictions relating to
semantics and pragmatics over a much longer period. The
semantics of the context will place great constraints on the
upcoming content (e.g., whether the speaker is likely to talk
about food, work, holiday plans, or whatever). Of course, such
information can come from the current utterance (e.g., Changing
the subject, I’m hungry—what would you . . . ). Sometimes this
information will only be apparent just before the prediction is
needed, but often the relevant words occur early in the utterance,
or in a previous utterance. In other cases, the information
comes from the non-linguistic context (e.g., an unfolding event
such as a parade), or from shared background knowledge (i.e.,
common ground). Usually, this information is available well
before the prediction is needed. The addressee also benefits
from determining the speaker’s speech act before it is complete,
because whether the speaker is producing a statement, question,
or command may help determine the upcoming length of the
utterance. (As we discuss later, determining the speech act is also
critical to preparing a response).
From these sources of information, the addressee could
predict what the speaker is likely to say. These predictions could

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 29

Garrod and Pickering

include determining how much the speaker has left to say, as
well as what the speaker is talking about. But to determine
when the speaker will finish, the addressee has to combine these
predictions with information about the speaker’s speech rate. As
our focus is on turn-transition, we now consider prediction of
remaining content (what the speaker has left to say) and precise
timing (when the speaker will finish). We then show how these
predictions feed into the content and timing of the response itself.

Using Prediction-by-Simulation in Turn
Transition
Now we account for addressees’ ability to predict turnending and deliver an appropriate and timely response. To do
this, we draw on the integrated account of production and
comprehension developed by Pickering and Garrod (2013a). This
account is broadly compatible with other integrated accounts,
which typically relate to language learning or distribution as well
as language processing, such as the P-Chain framework (Dell and
Chang, 2014) and the Production-Distribution-Comprehension
account (MacDonald, 2013), as well as by evidence that
prediction during comprehension engages production processes
(Federmeier, 2007).
To predict the speaker’s utterance, we proposed that the
addressee attempts to determine the speaker’s intention and
uses that intention to predict what the speaker would say. For
our purposes, the two aspects of this account that we need to
consider are (1) that the addressee combines interpretation of
the context and covert imitation of the speaker’s prior utterance
to estimate the intention; and (2) that the addressee uses the
intention to predict the speaker’s completion in the same way
that the addressee would predict his or her own utterance if
speaking at that point (though adjusting for differences between
the speaker and the addressee). This process is known as
prediction-by-simulation and works because the comprehender
has similar representations and mechanisms to the producer.
(Comprehenders may also use prediction-by-association, which
relies on past experiences during comprehension; see Pickering
and Garrod, 2013b, for discussion).
Consider a situation in which a mother is cooking dinner and
her son comes into the kitchen and turns to speak. Based on the
context (the food, the time, knowledge of her son’s habits) but
without any utterance, she estimates that his intention is to ask
what is for dinner. But he then says What are we going to do
after . . . and she now combines the context and the utterance to
derive an (updated) intention—that he is producing a question
in which the only missing element is something referring to
dinner. Pickering and Garrod (2013a) assume that she represents
his intention and that this constitutes her own “production
command,” which sets off the processes that she would use to
complete the utterance herself (adjusting for differences between
herself and her son). This means that she converts the prior
utterance into a production representation via “covert imitation,”
which is then compatible with the format of the intention.
To understand how addressees predict speakers’ utterances,
we first note that Pickering and Garrod (2013a) argued that

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

speakers predict their own utterances, using so-called forward
models. For example, it may take several hundred milliseconds
to start naming an object (e.g., Piai et al., 2011), but well before
this, speakers can construct representations of what they believe
they will say and what they will experience themselves saying.
Psycholinguistic evidence for this claim comes from the finding
that speakers are affected by the contextual probability of a target
word or phrase given the preceding context. If the probability is
higher, the speakers are more likely to produce a reduced form
(Aylett and Turk, 2004) or to omit an optional word such as
the complementizer that (Jaeger, 2010). This suggests that the
speaker is sensitive to the probability of the target given the
context, before uttering the target, and therefore has predicted
the target by this point.
Pickering and Garrod (2013a) based their account on
the mechanisms of action control, in which people predict
movements before they occur and while they are occurring (and
use their predictions to make corrections on-line; e.g., Wolpert,
1997). It assumes that people learn the relationship between their
intentions and the outcomes (e.g., speech or arm movement),
so that the forward model can be computed independently
of the implementation of the action. It also assumes that
people represent the inverse model of this relationship between
outcomes and intentions on the basis of the forward model.
They can then use the paired forward-inverse models to
predict the outcomes of their actions (via forward models) and
subsequently modify those actions when necessary (via inverse
models), with both the learning and the on-line control being
driven by prediction error minimization. Theories of speech
production make such claims about syllables and phonemes
(Hickok et al., 2011; Tourville and Guenther, 2011). Pickering
and Garrod (2013a) make the more general claim that speakers
can concurrently predict at the full range of linguistic levels, such
as semantics, syntax, and phonology, and that they also make
predictions about timing.
Following this, Pickering and Garrod (2013a) argued that
comprehenders predict other people’s utterances, again using
forward-inverse model pairings. For example, if they believe that
their partner is about to name an object, they can construct
representations of what they believe their partner will say and
what they will experience their partner saying. This is compatible
with theories of action perception, in which people predict their
partner’s unfolding movements (Wolpert et al., 2003; Oztop
et al., 2005). To do this, Pickering and Garrod argued that
comprehenders covertly imitate the speaker, derive the (putative)
intention of the speaker (using a combination of context and
inverse model), use that intention to derive their upcoming
intention, and treat this upcoming intention as the input to the
forward models that predict the upcoming utterance, again at
different linguistic levels (see also Pickering and Garrod, 2014).
This proposal means that predicting another person’s utterance
involves the same predictive mechanism used to predict one’s
own utterance.
Pickering and Garrod (2013a) explained dialog as a form
of joint action in which both interlocutors predict both their
own and their partner’s utterances. The addressee can predict
the speaker’s unfolding utterance and how he might respond

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 30

Garrod and Pickering

to that utterance. The speaker similarly can predict how she
will continue and how her partner might respond. Well-aligned
interlocutors (Pickering and Garrod, 2004) tend to make the
same predictions as each other. Moreover, Pickering and Garrod
(2014) proposed that interlocutors monitor the quality of these
predictions and use the discrepancies between predicted and
actual utterances (by themselves and their partners) to control
the flow of the dialog.
We propose that interlocutors make two different
types of prediction during comprehension, relating to
content and timing. The basis for content prediction is the
processes of language comprehension typically investigated in
psycholinguistics, and involves the extraction of phonology,
syntax, and particularly semantics that can be derived from
the speaker’s utterance. From these representations, the
comprehender can predict the phonology, syntax, and semantics
of the upcoming utterance. The basis for timing prediction is the
speaker’s speech rate, which the comprehender can use to predict
the rate of the upcoming utterance. We propose that these
mechanisms are distinct, but that they can influence each other
and be combined for various purposes. We now demonstrate
how they can be used to predict turn-endings. At the end of
the paper, we illustrate how they can be combined for other
purposes, for example to resolve ambiguities (e.g., Dilley and
Pitt, 2010).
To return to our example, the mother uses context to
determine the boy’s putative intention before he starts to speak
and predicts that he will produce a fairly short question asking
about what is for dinner. After the boy begins to speak, she
revises her prediction by combining context with her covert
imitation of the boy’s incomplete utterance What are we going to
do after . . . (a process that is in fact informed by her monitoring
the discrepancy between his incoming utterance and her prior
prediction). She therefore covertly imitates the boy’s utterance,
derives the boy’s intention in producing What are we going to do
after and derives her belief about his upcoming intention, which
we assume is to produce the word dinner and then stop. She then
predicts aspects of the form of dinner (e.g., main meal, noun,
/dIn@r/, rising intonation, two syllables).
Note that Pickering and Garrod (2013a) argued that forward
models are likely to be impoverished—not containing all of
the information included in the implemented representations
underlying actual speech (see several commentaries and
Pickering and Garrod, 2013b, for discussion). By repeatedly
producing utterances as a result of intentions, the speaker
learns different intention-utterance regularities. She can draw on
different regularities depending on the situation—for example,
predicting the semantic class of the upcoming word (e.g., when
predicting whether a speaker is going to suggest one of a set of
restaurants) or the initial sound (when predicting whether the
speaker is going to suggest a particular restaurant, e.g., Kalpna).
The speaker predicts different aspects of the upcoming utterance
on different occasions. Such flexibility clearly makes the forward
models more useful for aiding fluency, but it also means that
we cannot determine which aspects of an utterance will be
represented on a particular occasion. In Alario and Hamamé’s
(2013) terms, we assume that the “opt-out” is circumstantial

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

rather than systematic. For example, predictions may contain
“fine-grained phonetic detail,” contra Trude (2013); see Pickering
and Garrod (2013b, p. 379).
Quite separately, she determines his speech rate, which we
assume is in terms of syllables, say 170 ms/syllable. Below, we
discuss evidence both that speakers compute speech rate in
terms of syllables and that they entrain on syllable rate. The
boy’s mother therefore assumes (without further computation)
that the upcoming speech rate will also be 170 ms/syllable.
Let us assume that her “target” is to leave a one-syllable gap
between her son’s contribution and her own (corresponding
to what Schegloff, 2000, calls a beat). To determine point of
initiation, she therefore estimates the length in syllables of her
son’s predicted completion (2) plus the gap (1), and multiplies
them by syllable time (i.e., 3 × 170 ms = 510 ms). At the same
time, she constructs linguistic representations for What are we
going to do after dinner (i.e., including dinner), and uses them
to prepare an appropriate response (e.g., Play football, which
is syntactically and semantically appropriate). This preparation
involves extension of the forward model to incorporate self- as
well as other-prediction, and also involves the implementer—in
other words, actual accessing of linguistic representations such as
the lexical entries for play and football. This allows her to utter
Play football after a one-syllable interval, assuming that he does
utter dinner and takes 340 ms to do so.
Comprehenders might predict their partner’s penultimate
word and final word (both in terms of timing and content).
Making these two predictions at the same time does not
lead to resource competition because they are two compatible
predictions, as they follow from the same process of covert
imitation: one is the result of production command that would be
used to predict the next word [iB (t + 1) in the terms of Pickering
and Garrod, 2013a], and the other the result of production
command that would be used to produce the word after that
(iB (t + 2)). For example, they might predict a completion of
after (in 340 ms) and dinner (in 640 ms). They do not compete
for resources. We have also noted that comprehenders make
predictions about their partner’s completion and their own
response (though of course they need to “tag” whether a specific
prediction is about themselves or their partner). For example,
they might predict their partner’s final word dinner in 340 ms and
their own response Play football in 510 ms. If these predictions
are compatible, they will also not compete for resources. This
will be true if the comprehender is well-aligned with the speaker,
something that is likely to be the case in a simple question-answer
case such as this. Of course, if someone is trying to comprehend a
speaker while preparing an unrelated utterance (e.g., at a “cocktail
party”), the self- and other-predictions are unlikely to be aligned
and processing difficulties may ensue.
Note also that comprehenders may use forward models
to predict multiple alternatives, weighted according to their
likelihood (e.g., Wolpert and Kawato, 1998). Such multiple
predictions are particularly valuable during comprehension,
because the speaker may often produce one of many alternatives
(e.g., dinner, supper, the meal). In fact, there is some
evidence for parallel prediction in both ERP studies (DeLong
et al., 2005) and corpus-based investigations of reading time

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 31

Garrod and Pickering

(Smith and Levy, 2013). Such parallel prediction does not
appear to be resource-intensive (as it is in many dual
tasks).
Importantly, the content and timing predictions are
combined, but they remain separate predictions. The
comprehender does not construct a single (indivisible)
representation of timing and content. This means that the
comprehender can change either timing or content as necessary.
For example, the boy might not stop after dinner but produce
further words, or perhaps speak slowly or disfluently. If so, the
mother would need to alter prediction of timing but not content.
Alternatively, the boy might (unexpectedly) say swimming rather
than dinner, in which case the mother would have to revise her
interpretation (based on monitoring; Pickering and Garrod,
2014) but not timing. Below we explain how the flexibility
induced by separate representations appears to be used in
practice.
In more general terms, then, we assume that the addressee is
constantly covertly imitating the speaker, and uses the process
of covert imitation to make predictions about both the timing
and the content of the speaker’s utterance. This process supports
alignment (Pickering and Garrod, 2004), so that the addressee’s
linguistic representations become more similar to those of
the speaker, as well as entrainment of timing (see below).
Sometimes the addressee predicts that the speaker is about
to finish and that it would be appropriate for the addressee
to take the floor. Alongside this, the addressee uses forward
modeling to predict the speaker’s concluding utterance and
the addressee’s own response (in a way that is aided by the
alignment that has taken place). After the speaker finishes, and
assuming that the addressee’s prediction is correct or sufficiently
close, the addressee speaks appropriately and at the appropriate
time. We now discuss how entrainment of timing can take
place, before turning to the question of how the addressee
monitors the speaker’s utterance and how difficulties can be
managed.

How does the Addressee Entrain Timing
with the Speaker?
Arnal and Giraud (2012) argued that the brain implements
predictions about timing and content in different ways. More
specifically, predictions about the timing of sensory events
are based on cortical oscillations in the low frequency range
(delta band, 1–3 Hz; theta band, 4–8 Hz), whereas predictions
about sensory content are based on higher frequency cortical
oscillations (gamma band, about 30–60 Hz). Both auditory and
pre-motor cortex reveal ambient neural oscillations in the
theta range (Giraud et al., 2007). Those in the auditory cortex
become entrained to theta oscillations in the speech envelope
(see Gross et al., 2013; Zion Golumbic et al., 2013). These
theta oscillations correspond to the frequency of the speaker
opening and closing her mouth and hence the rate of her
syllabic articulation (Chandrasekaran et al., 2009). According
to Arnal and Giraud, predictive timing arises from this lowlevel mechanism of neural entrainment. In the presence of a

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

fast speaker, the auditory cortex first adapts by increasing the
rate of oscillations. These entrained oscillations then become
predictive by creating periodical temporal windows for higherorder regions to read out encoded information (see also Kotz and
Schwartze, 2010; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012). In other words, low
frequency cortical oscillations come to predict the precise timing
of critical speech events (at the level of the beginning and end of
syllables).
There is now considerable empirical support for this with
respect to speech perception. For example, Zion Golumbic et al.
(2013) recorded ECoG (Electrocorticographic) activity in the
auditory cortex as listeners attended to one of two speakers in
a simulated “cocktail party” situation. They found that both the
phase of low frequency cortical activity (i.e., delta and theta
band) and the power of higher frequency cortical activity (high
gamma) tracked the low frequency aspects of the speech envelope
(i.e., the speech wave), for the attended but not the unattended
speech. Follow-up analyses indicated that the higher frequency
effects reflected evoked responses, whereas the low frequency
effects reflected processes more closely related to perception.
This latter finding suggests that low frequency speech tracking
serves to limit the transfer of sensory responses to higher-order
brain regions. As the low frequency phase of the attended and
unattended speech is likely to be different, the listener can use
phase tracking for selective attention.
Furthermore, they found that the precision of low frequency
tracking increased steadily from the beginning to end of each
attended utterance, consistent with a predictive process. Using
a somewhat different approach, Gross et al. (2013) compared
oscillatory MEG (Magnoencephalographic) signals in the cortex
with those in the speech envelope for a 7-min narrative played
both forwards and backwards. Mutual Information analyses
revealed that low frequency (i.e., delta, theta band) cortical
oscillations (in the right hemisphere auditory cortex) encoded
the phase of low frequency oscillations in the speech envelope,
whereas higher frequency (i.e., gamma) cortical oscillations (in
the left hemisphere auditory cortex) encoded the energy of
higher frequency oscillations in the speech envelope. Notably,
the degree of oscillatory entrainment was much greater for the
forward as opposed to the backward speech. Further, analyses of
the forward speech established that transients (i.e., high energy
bursts of sound) at the beginning of utterances reset the phase
of low frequency cortical oscillations to bring it into line with
the phase of low frequency oscillations in the speech envelope.
Such resetting of the transients did not occur to the same extent
for backward speech. This suggests that these effects reflected
top-down predictive processing as opposed to bottom-up evoked
responses.
These and related findings (see Ding and Simon, 2014) clearly
implicate a low frequency oscillatory tracking system which
represents current speech rate and predicts how it will unfold in
the immediate future. Although the functional explanation for
this entrainment process has been primarily related to syllabic
parsing (Ghitza, 2011, 2013) or selective attention (Ding and
Simon, 2012; Zion Golumbic et al., 2013), we propose that it may
also play an important role in predicting when an interlocutor’s
turn will end and timing the addressee’s response onset.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 32

Garrod and Pickering

We hypothesize that cortical theta oscillations entrained
during speech comprehension also influence the rate of speech
production, probably mediated by mid-brain circuitry (see
Giraud et al., 2007; Kotz and Schwartze, 2010). In other words,
theta oscillations in auditory cortex entrain theta oscillations in
premotor cortex, which in turn influence both the timing of the
speech onset and rate of articulation. We assume that the rate
and phase of oscillation play a causal role in such entrainment
(though it is conceivable that entrainment results from some
underlying pattern of neural activity that is highly correlated with
oscillation). This is pertinent because (as we have noted), turntransition involves more than detecting when an interlocutor’s
turn will end; it also involves initiating one’s own turn in a timely
fashion, with such inter-turn intervals reflecting the current
speech rate. The finding that, during dialog, interlocutors’ speech
rates and turn transition times become entrained (Street, 1984)
is consistent with coupling between the current speaker’s rate

FIGURE 1 | A schematic illustration of the turn ending prediction
mechanism, with A as addressee (below black line) and B as
current speaker (above black line). Above the line, B’s unfolding
utterance content is shown as p [sem, syn, phon]B (t) and
p [sem, syn, phon]B (t + 1), which refer to semantic, syntactic, and
phonological representations of the current utterance (at time t) and the
upcoming utterance (at time t + 1, with the underlining indicating that
they are B’s representations; see Pickering and Garrod, 2013a). The
timing of B’s speech is represented in terms of the entrained theta

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

and the subsequent speech rate of their partner (cf. Jungers and
Hupp, 2009, for priming of speech rate in monolog). It is also
consistent with Wilson and Wilson’s (2005) proposal that the
timing of turn-transitions is based on an underlying entrainment
of syllabic speech-rate oscillations. Our proposal, therefore, is
that interlocutors entrain theta oscillations in auditory cortex
and premotor cortex, and that such entrainment underlies the
coordination of comprehension and production in turn-taking.
In conclusion, interlocutors entrain their speech rates based
on low-frequency acoustic information. This process appears
to be quite separate from the mechanisms of predictionby-simulation and alignment, which are based on linguistic
representations. However, the addressee can combine the results
of entrainment (i.e., prediction of timing) with those of
linguistic prediction (i.e., prediction of content) to determine the
appropriate timing for turn transitions, as we illustrated in the
previous section (see Figure 1).

oscillations in B’s speech envelope. Below the line, A’s prediction of the
content of B’s unfolding utterance is shown as
ĉ [sem, syn, phon]B (t + 1) and A’s prediction of B’s speech timing is
shown in terms of theta oscillations in A’s auditory cortex. The predicted
content comes from A covertly imitating B’s utterance at time t, deriving
B’s putative production command at time t+1 and then feeding this
production command into forward models to generate the predictions
for time t+1. The predicted timing comes from entrainment of B’s
cortical theta oscillations with theta oscillations in A’s speech envelope.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 33

Garrod and Pickering

But because the mechanisms of prediction of timing and
content are shared with production, we propose that they also
aid the addressee’s own utterance production. The form of the
question (e.g., What are we going to do after dinner?) requires
a type of answer (verb phrase specifying an activity), which the
addressee can prepare by using the same mechanisms that he uses
in comprehension. The addressee’s onset and rate of articulation
follow from the entrainment of speech rate, and specifically the
suggestion that such entrainment may also occur in pre-motor
cortex (Giraud et al., 2007). This entrainment could therefore be
directly applied to the onset and timing of syllable production
in relation to the addressee’s response, on the assumption that
ambient theta oscillations in pre-motor cortex influence the
timing of speech articulation.

Preparing an Appropriate Response
So far we have concentrated on prediction of content and timing
of a partner’s current contribution and how this enables the
addressee to estimate when the turn will end. But addressees do
not merely have to predict content and turn endings; they also
have to prepare an appropriate response, or decide not to do
so. Recent research has begun to consider the extent to which
a responder’s planning overlaps with the previous utterance.
These studies make use of dual-tasking paradigms (e.g., target
tracking or finger tapping) to demonstrate more disruption
during production than comprehension (Boiteau et al., 2014;
Sjerps and Meyer, 2015). Importantly, the main indication of
difficulty during comprehension occurs in about the last half
second of the previous utterance, suggesting that planning occurs
quite late but is time-locked to turn-ending.
To respond appropriately, the new speaker has to determine
the speaker’s speech act. For example, a non-rhetorical question
mandates a (relevant) answer (or some other valid response
such as a query), whereas a rhetorical question does not.
Because utterance planning takes time (as we have argued),
fluid conversation requires that the addressee should (in general)
determine the speech act before the utterance is complete.
On occasion, it may not be possible to determine the speech
act before the end of the utterance (e.g., because the only
relevant information is rising intonation, indicating a question).
However, such cases are almost certainly quite rare (Levinson,
2012). For example, the widespread occurrence of Wh-words
or subject-verb inversion (e.g., Is the . . . ) as the beginning of
a question provides the addressee with a clear early indication
of the speech act. In addition, dialog is full of “pre-sequences”
(Schegloff, 1988) that make the upcoming speech act clear
well in advance (e.g., Can I ask you a question?). Of course,
responses are generally congruent with the prior utterance. This
is obviously the case for semantics, but is also often true for
syntax, as in question-answer pairs (e.g., Levelt and Kelter, 1982)
or cross-speaker completions (e.g., Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs,
1986). We propose that comprehenders can make use of this
congruency when planning their responses, and use it to share
resources between comprehension and preparing production, in
accord with Pickering and Garrod (2013a) and in particular the
prediction-by-simulation route.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

How Addressees Take the Floor
We have argued that addressees primarily use prediction-bysimulation to predict the content of the speaker’s utterance and
use prediction-by-simulation in combination with oscillatory
entrainment to predict its timing. Prediction of content is
enhanced by alignment at many linguistic levels and also
facilitates the formulation of an appropriate response. Prediction
of timing is used to determine when the speaker will end, and
more importantly, when the addressee should start speaking. We
now illustrate our account with examples of speaker-addressee
turn transition, some of which include difficulties. As the
examples show, turn-transition can be entirely straightforward,
but very often it leads to minor disruption that can be internally
managed (i.e., by the interlocutors themselves); our focus is on
spontaneous conversation. Rather more occasionally, it leads to
some form of conversational breakdown.
First consider an excerpt from (1) above. Bee describes
purchasing an expensive art book and then produces you know
(highlighted). While hearing this, Ava predicts that Bee is likely
to end at this point and that Ava can (or should) take the
floor (i.e., this constitutes a potential turn-transition point). The
timing of the response is the result of entrainment based on
Bee’s speech rate. Ava’s response not drop it reuses part of Bee’s
previous utterance, as expressed in the words drop and it and
the way they are combined; this repetition occurs because Ava
has linguistically aligned with Bee. Interestingly, Bee speaks at
the same time as Ava, and produces a semantically equivalent
utterance (hold onto it). This shows that both Ava’s utterance
and her timing were appropriate and that her prediction was
successful.
1 (excerpt).
Bee: Yeuh he-ez he wz handing me the book en ’etol’ me
twunny dolliz I almos’ dro(h)pped i(h)[t ‘hh ‘hh
Ava:
[thhunh.
Bee: ‘hhh I said but fer twunny dollars I bettuh hh ‘hh
yihknow,
(0.2)
Bee: ‘hhh h[hold o:nto it (h)hh] huhh huh] ‘hh!
Ava:
[not drop
it. ] huhh huh]
P(0.2)
Bee: Ih wz, (0.2) y’know (fun)....
However, Bee’s response also creates a problem, because it means
that Bee wishes to continue speaking. Ava and Bee’s overlap
is quite extensive, presumably because they are semantically
well aligned (and may therefore find it possible to comprehend
and produce three-word overlaps). But they then both produce
laughter and stop speaking, before Bee continues. In terms of
Pickering and Garrod (2014), after you know, Ava predicts that
she will say not drop it after (say) 300 ms (corresponding to the
silence plus laughter). This self-prediction turns out to be correct.
Although she may realize what Bee would have said at this point,
she presumably does not predict that Bee will also speak at this
time, as overlapping speech is strongly disfavored. When Bee
does speak, Ava compares her prediction that Bee will not speak
with the actual event. This leads to a conflict that could result

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 34

Garrod and Pickering

in her stopping speaking, but in fact she judges that uttering the
three words will not be problematic. Similarly, Bee presumably
does not predict that Ava will speak at that point, but also
judges that continuation would not be problematic. However, the
overlap between Ava and Bee can be seen analogous to a speech
error (i.e., internal to one speaker) and the laughter, pause, and
Bee’s eventual continuation can be seen as a form of repair [see
points (a) and (g) in discussion of Sacks et al., 1974].
In other cases, the transitions are not quite so successful and
require some management. In Example 2 (from Schegloff, 1996,
p. 85), Ava begins by describing her unexpected activity3 .
2.
Ava: I’m so:: ti:yid. I j’s played ba:ske’ball t’day since the
firs’ time since I wz a freshm’n in hi:ghsch[ool.]
Bee:
[Ba:]sk(h)=
=etb(h)a(h)ll? (h)[ ( •owhe(h)re
Ava:
[Yeah fuh like an hour enna ha:[lf. ]
Bee:
[.hh]
Bee: Where didju play ba:sk[etbaw.
]
Ava:
[(The) gy:m].
Bee: In the gy:m?
Bee appears to predict that Ava is in the middle of uttering
high school and about to finish speaking (or at least, reach
a turn-transition point). Bee therefore queries Basketball?,
indicating surprise. Ava appears to interpret Bee’s contribution
as providing an invitation for Ava to expand, but in fact Bee
intends to continue with a more specific question (beginning
where). So both Ava and Bee predict their own utterance and
its timing, but also predict that their partner is not about
to speak. When their partner does speak, a clash ensues—
with Ava continuing but Bee ceding the floor. However, we
propose that Bee retained her question (i.e., her planned
utterance) until she was able to predict a turn-transition point
(toward the end of half ) and then produced it. Ava, in turn,
predicted that Bee was uttering basketball after the first syllable
and produced an appropriate response (the gym) as Ava was
finishing her question. We propose that dealing with these
transitions requires speakers to make separate predictions of
both content and timing, in accord with our account. (Note
that the overlap is twice associated with minor disruption to the
first speaker’s turn ending, both in high school and basketball;
see Schegloff, 2000).
So far, our examples have been from dyadic interactions. In
multi-party conversations, different addressees may be permitted
to speak at a turn-transition point. This situation can often lead to
short periods of overlapping speech (where there is “competition
for the floor”). In (3), Kathy is describing hand-weaving at a
dinner party (from Schegloff, 2000, p. 31). After pausing and
3 A more literal

rendition of this exchange is:
Ava: I’m so tired. I just played basketball today. The first time since I was a
freshman in high school –
Bee: Basketball – where?
Ava: Yes, for like an hour and a halfBee: Where did you play basketball?
Ava: The gym
Bee: In the gym?

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

saying you know, both Dave and Rubin speak at the same time.
Dave withdraws, and Rubin completes a question to Kathy,
who responds to him. We propose that both Dave and Rubin
predict that Kathy is about to complete her utterance you know
and that a response is appropriate. They both predict timing
correctly, so that they start immediately after Kathy finishes
and therefore at the same time as each other. But neither
predicts that the other is about to speak. Hence, there is a large
discrepancy between their predictions and what actually happens.
(Of course, it is possible that Dave predicts that Rubin would
speak but decided to speak anyway, in which case Dave would
not encounter such a large discrepancy during monitoring).
Dave’s approach to this discrepancy is to abandon speech,
thus preventing the communicative failure that would likely
occur following extended overlap, whereas Rubin’s approach
is to carry on regardless (perhaps assuming that Dave will
give up)4 .
3.
Kathy: So once I’d set up the warp, i’ w’s very simple to
jus’ keep-jus’ to weave it.
(0.8)
Kathy: You know[ ( )
Dave:
[ ( But listen tuh how long )
]
Rubin:
[In other words, you gotta string up thee]
you gotta string up thee colors, is that it
Kathy: [ Right ]
Rubin: [in thee ] in thee [warp.]
Kathy:
[right ]
Finally, we note that the addressee can separate the process
of prediction from the process of preparing a response. The
response can be “ready” before it is executed (just as in Ferreira,
1991; Piai et al., 2011). In (4) (from Schegloff, 2000, p. 25), a
family is querying Anne’s claim that she used to buy a pair of
shoes a month before she was married, and her husband Dick
keeps attempting to make a joke about it:5
4 A more literal

rendition of this exchange is:
Kathy: So once I have set up the warp, it was very simple to just keep – just weave
it. You know.
Dave: But listen to how long –
Rubin: In other words, you have got to string up the – you have got to string up
three colors, is that it.
Kathy: Right.
Rubin: In the – in the warp.
Kathy: Right
5 A more literal rendition of this exchange is:
Anne: Every six months I went in for shoes. and I had– must have had about, a
hundred pairs a shoes.
Deb: Really mother you spent–
Dick: You know what Deb: Boy were you wasted
Dick: you know she exaggerated slightly.
Dick: You know what– you know–
Deb: What a waster you were
Anne: Don’t say that I’m exa– just say I’m a liar.
Dick: You know what your –
Deb: It’s not a question of lying it’s a question of being–
Dick: Your grandmother is a centipede that’s why she has to have a hundred pairs of
shoes.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 35

Garrod and Pickering

4.
Anne: Every six months I wen’ in fih shoes. ’n I hadmust’v had about, (0.5) a hundred pairs a shoes.
(2.0)
Deb: Really mother = you spent(1.0)
Dick: You know [wha : t,]
Deb:
[Boy we ]re you:: w- [ w a s t e d
]
Dick:
[(you know) sh-]
Exaggerated slightly.
(0.8)
Dick: Y’ [know what-y’know- [ ( )
]
Deb:
[w h a t a w a s
[ter you ] w e r e
]
Anne:
[DON’T S]AYthat I’m ex]=
=a- just say I’m a liar.
Dick: Y’know what, yer [ grandmother ]=
Deb:
[>’ts nota question<] of =
=[<ly:ing ’t’s a question of being- >]
Dick: =[yer GRANDMOTHER IS A CENTI]PE:DE,
that’s why- she esstuh hev a khundred pairs of
shoes.
At (24), (29), and (33) (in bold), Dick tries and fails to utter the
joke (i.e., Anne is a centipede) that he eventually manages at (36).
Dick uses prediction of timing and content to determine a turntransition point on all four occasions. However, Deb manages
to capture the floor three times. On each occasion, Dick has
a prepared utterance, which is presumably ready throughout
the interchange (from [24] onwards, at least), and hence the
preparation of the utterance is separate from the predicted
timing. This is a further indication of the distinction between
mechanisms for timing and content.

Implications and Discussion
We have shown how content can be combined with timing to
predict the end of the interlocutor’s turn and determine the
appropriate moment to speak. But content and timing can also
be used to determine content itself. A good example comes from
Dilley and Pitt (2010), who presented listeners with a context
spoken at different rates preceding the phrase leisure or time and
found that they tended to hear it as leisure time (i.e., without or)
if the context was spoken slowly. They then presented listeners
with a context preceding the phrase leisure time and found that
they tended to hear the phrase as leisure or time if the context
was spoken quickly. Presumably, participants are entrained to
the contextual speech rate and then predict that the upcoming
phrase will also be produced at that rate. Their interpretation of
the phrase is therefore dependent on their predictions. In terms of
Figure 1, the predicted timing is used to help determine utterance
content.
In this paper, we have focused on the role of prediction
during comprehension on turn transition. Specifically, we have

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

argued that comprehenders predict the speaker’s content and
speech rate, and use these to compute what they are likely
to say and how quickly they are likely to say it. We also
assume that such prediction helps the comprehender decide
when to speak and what to say. However, Pickering and Garrod
(2013a) also proposed that prediction during comprehension aids
comprehension itself (e.g., facilitating word recognition in noise),
aids learning (as comprehenders learn from the discrepancy
between the prediction and the actual speech), permits other
monitoring (e.g., detecting speaker’s errors; Pickering and
Garrod, 2014), and assists in the process of alignment (Pickering
and Garrod, 2004). Finally, we note that our account is consistent
with the effects of timing disruption in dialog. It has been known
for 50 years that delaying transmission can seriously disrupt
conversation (e.g., Krauss and Bricker, 1967).
A specific set of empirical predictions following from this
account concern the separation of timing and content. In a
turn-taking paradigm (e.g., question-answering), there should
be separate effects of content difficulty (e.g., hard vs. easy
questions) and regularity of timing (e.g., varying regularity
of speech rate). But in addition, we propose that turn-taking
relates to a combination of timing and predicted length in
syllables. If a speaker expects a long sentence-final word but
gets a short one (e.g., Is the largest animal in zoo the bear?,
when elephant is expected), then the turn interval should be
larger than if the expected word was short (Is the fiercest
animal in the zoo the bear, when lion is expected), but this
interval should also be affected by speech rate. Experiments
such as these should be able to show how predictions of
timing and content are separable but ultimately combined in
turn-taking.
In conclusion, we have presented a cognitive account to
explain the skill with which conversationalists manage turntransitions in dialog. The account covers addressees’ ability
to predict when their interlocutor’s turn will end, to craft an
appropriate response, and to implement the response in a
timely fashion. To do this, we propose that they make use
of prediction-by-simulation to predict upcoming content and
oscillatory entrainment to predict timing. Whereas predicted
content depends on forward modeling mechanisms similar to
those used in control of speech production, predicted timing
results from sensitivity to characteristics of the speech envelope.
However, the addressee brings these predictions together in a
way that leads to well-coordinated dialog, with very brief turn
transitions. In this way, we propose that interlocutors are able
to make an apparently difficult aspect of conversation appear
remarkably straightforward.

Acknowledgments
Martin J. Pickering acknowledges support from a Leverhulme
Trust Research Project Grant, RPG-2014-253.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 36

Garrod and Pickering

Predicting turn transitions

References

Jaeger, F. (2010). Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage
syntactic information density. Cogn. Psychol. 61, 23–62. doi:
10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.02.002
Jungers, M. K., and Hupp, J. M. (2009). Speech priming: evidence for rate
persistence in unscripted speech. Lang. Cogn. Process. 24, 611–624. doi:
10.1080/01690960802602241
Kotz, S. A., and Schwartze, M. (2010). Cortical speech processing unplugged:
a timely subcortical-cortical framework. Trends Cogn. Sci. 14, 392–399. doi:
10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.005
Krauss, R. M., and Bricker, P. D. (1967). Effects of transmission delay and access
delay on the efficiency of verbal communication. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 41,
286–292. doi: 10.1121/1.1910338
Levelt, W. J. M., and Kelter, S. (1982). Surface form and memory in question
answering. Cogn. Psychol. 14, 78–106. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(82)90005-6
Levinson, S. C. (2012). “Action formation and ascription,” in Handbook of
Conversational Analysis, eds J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Oxford: Blackwell),
103–130.
Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106,
1126–1177. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.006
MacDonald, M. C. (2013). How language production shapes language form and
comprehension. Front. Psychol. 4:226. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00226
Magyari, L., and De Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based
on anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00376
Oztop, E., Wolpert, D., and Kawato, M. (2005). Mental state inference
using visual control parameters. Cogn. Brain Res. 22, 129–151. doi:
10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.08.004
Piai, V., Roelofs, A., and Schriefers, H. (2011). Semantic interference in immediate
and delayed naming and reading: attention and task decisions. J. Mem. Lang.
64, 404–423. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2011.01.004
Pickering, M. J., and Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of
dialogue. Behav. Brain Sci. 27, 169–225. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X04000056
Pickering, M. J., and Garrod, S. (2013a). An integrated theory of language
production and comprehension. Behav. Brain Sci. 36, 329–392. doi:
10.1017/S0140525X12001495
Pickering, M. J., and Garrod, S. (2013b). Forward models and their implications
for production, comprehension and dialogue. Behav. Brain Sci. 36, 377–392.
doi: 10.1017/S0140525X12003238
Pickering, M. J., and Garrod, S. (2014). Self-, other-, and joint monitoring using
forward models. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8:132. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00132
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.1353/lan.1974.0010
Sahin, N. T., Pinker, S., Cash, S. S., Schomer, D., and Halgren, E. (2009). Sequential
processing of lexical, grammatical, and articulatory information within Broca’s
area. Science 326, 445–449. doi: 10.1126/science.1174481
Schegloff, E. A. (1988). Presequences and indirection: applying speech act
theory to ordinary conversation. J. Pragmat. 12, 55–62. doi: 10.1016/03782166(88)90019-7
Schegloff, E. A. (1996). “Turn organization: one intersection of grammar and
interaction,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff and S.
A. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 52–133.
Schegloff, E. A. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking in
conversation. Lang. Soc. 29, 1–63. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500001019
Sjerps, M. J., and Meyer, A. S. (2015). Variation in dual-task performance reveals
late initiation of speech planning in turn-taking. Cognition 136, 304–324. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2014.10.008
Smith, N. J., and Levy, R. (2013). The effect of word predictability on reading time
is logarithmic. Cognition 128, 302–319. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.013
Staub, A., and Clifton, C. Jr. (2006). Syntactic prediction in language
comprehension: Evidence from either. . . or. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn.
32, 425–436. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.32.2.425
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T.,
et al. (2009). Universality and cultural specificity in turn-taking in conversation.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Street, R. L. (1984). Speech convergence and speech evaluation in factfinding interviews. Hum. Commun. Res. 11, 139–169. doi: 10.1111/j.14682958.1984.tb00043.x

Alario, F.-X., and Hamamé, C. M. (2013). Evidence from, and predictions from,
forward modeling in language production. Behav. Brain Sci. 36, 348–349. doi:
10.1017/S0140525X1200249X
Arnal, L. H., and Giraud, A.-L. (2012). Cortical oscillations and sensory
predictions. Trends Cogn. Sci. 16, 390–398. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.05.003
Aylett, M., and Turk, A. (2004). The smooth signal redundancy hypothesis:
a functional explanation for relationships between redundancy, prosodic
prominence, and duration in spontaneous speech. Lang. Speech. 47, 31–56. doi:
10.1177/00238309040470010201
Boiteau, T. W., Malone, P. S., Peters, S. A., and Almor, A. (2014). Interference
between conversation and a concurrent visuomotor task. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.
143, 295–311. doi: 10.1037/a0031858
Chandrasekaran, C., Trubanova, A., Stillittano, S., Caplier, A., and Ghazanfar,
A. A. (2009). The natural statistics of audiovisual speech. PLoS Comput. Biol.
5:e1000436. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000436
Clark, H. H., and Wilkes-Gibbs, D. (1986). Referring as a collaborative process.
Cognition 22, 1–39. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(86)90010-7
Dell, G. S., and Chang, F. (2014). The P-Chain: relating sentence production and
its disorders to comprehension and acquisition. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B.
Biol. Sci. 369:20120394. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0394
DeLong, K. A., Urbach, T. P., and Kutas, M. (2005). Probabilistic word preactivation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain
activity. Nat. Neurosci. 8, 1117–1121. doi: 10.1038/nn1504
De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
Dilley, L. C., and Pitt, M. A. (2010). Altering context speech rate can
cause words to appear and disappear. Psychol. Sci. 21, 1664–1167. doi:
10.1177/0956797610384743
Ding, N., and Simon, J. Z. (2012). Neural coding of continuous speech in auditory
cortex during monaural and dichotic listening. J. Neurophysiol. 107, 78–89. doi:
10.1152/jn.00297.2011
Ding, N., and Simon, J. Z. (2014). Cortical entrainment to continuous speech:
functional roles and interpretations. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8:311. doi:
10.3389/fnhum.2014.00311
Federmeier, K. D. (2007). Thinking ahead: the role and roots of prediction in
language comprehension. Psychophysiology 44, 491–505. doi: 10.1111/j.14698986.2007.00531.x
Ferreira, F. (1991). Effects of length and syntactic complexity on initiation
times for prepared utterances. J. Mem. Lang. 30, 210–233. doi: 10.1016/0749596X(91)90004-4
Ghitza, O. (2011). Linking speech perception and neurophysiology: speech
decoding guided by cascaded oscillators locked to the input rhythm. Front.
Psychol. 2:130. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00130
Ghitza, O. (2013). The theta-syllable: a unit of speech information defined by
cortical function. Front. Psychol. 4:138. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00138
Giraud, A. L., Kleinschmidt, A., Poeppel, D., Lund, T. E., Frachowiak, R. S.
J., and Laufs, H. (2007). Endogenous cortical rhythms determine cerebral
specialization for speech perception and production. Neuron 56, 1127–1134.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.09.038
Giraud, A. L., and Poeppel, D. (2012). Cortical oscillations and speech processing:
Emerging computational principles and operations. Nat. Neurosci., 15,
511–517. doi: 10.1038/nn.3063
Gross, J., Hoogenboom, N., Thut, G., Schyns, P., Panzerri, S., Belin, P., et al. (2013).
Speech rhythms and multiplexed oscillatory sensory coding in the human
brain. PLoS Biol. 11:e1001752. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001752
Hale, J. (2001). “A probabilistic early parser as a psycholinguistic model,”
in Proceedings of the second meeting of the North American Chapter
of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language technologies
(Pittsburgh, PA).
Hickok, G., Houde, J., and Rong, F. (2011). Sensorimotor integration of speech
processing: computational basis and neural organization. Neuron 69, 407–422.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.01.019
Indefrey, P., and Levelt, W. J. M. (2004). The spatial and temporal
signatures of word production components. Cognition 92, 101–144. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2002.06.001

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 37

Garrod and Pickering

Tourville, J. A., and Guenther, F. K. (2011). The DIVA model: A neural theory
of speech acquisition and production. Lang. Cogn. Process. 26, 952–981. doi:
10.1080/01690960903498424
Trude, A. M. (2013). When to simulate and when to associate? Accounting for
inter-talker variability in the speech signal. Behav. Brain Sci. 36, 375–376. doi:
10.1017/S0140525X12002701
Van Berkum, J. J. A., Brown, M. C., Zwitserlood, P., Kooijman, V., and Hagoort,
P. (2005). Anticipating upcoming words in discourse: evidence from ERPs
and reading times. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 31, 443–467. doi:
10.1037/0278-7393.31.3.443
Wilson, M., and Wilson, T. P. (2005). An oscillator model of the timing of
turn-taking. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 12, 957–968. doi: 10.3758/BF03206432
Wolpert, D. M. (1997). Computational approaches to motor control. Trends Cogn.
Sci. 1, 209–216. doi: 10.1016/S1364-6613(97)01070-X
Wolpert, D. M., Doya, K., and Kawato, M. (2003). A unifying computational
framework for motor control and social interaction. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond.
B 358, 593–602. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2002.1238

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Predicting turn transitions

Wolpert, D. M., and Kawato, M. (1998). Multiple paired forward and inverse
models for motor control. Neural Netw. 11, 1317–1329. doi: 10.1016/S08936080(98)00066-5
Zion Golumbic, E. M., Ding, N., Bickel, S., Lakatos, P., Schevon, C. A., et al. (2013).
Mechanisms underlying selective neuronal tracking of attended speech at a
“cocktail party.” Neuron 77, 980–991. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.12.037
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Garrod and Pickering. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use,
distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal
is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 751 | 38

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 28 September 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01416

Social coordination in animal vocal
interactions. Is there any evidence of
turn-taking? The starling as an
animal model
Laurence Henry 1*, Adrian J. F. K. Craig 2 , Alban Lemasson 1, 3 and Martine Hausberger 1
1
Laboratoire d’éthologie animale et humaine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 6552, Université de
Rennes 1, Rennes, France, 2 Department of Zoology and Entomology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa,
3
Laboratoire d’éthologie animale et humaine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 6552, Station Biologique,
Université de Rennes 1, Paimpont, France

Edited by:
Marisa Casillas,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Daniel Yasumasa Takahashi,
Princeton University, USA
Federico Rossano,
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Germany
*Correspondence:
Laurence Henry,
Laboratoire d’éthologie
animale et humaine, Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique,
UMR 6552, 263 Avenue du
Général Leclerc,
35042 Rennes Cedex, France
lhenry@univ-rennes1.fr
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 01 February 2015
Accepted: 04 September 2015
Published: 28 September 2015
Citation:
Henry L, Craig AJFK, Lemasson A
and Hausberger M (2015) Social
coordination in animal vocal
interactions. Is there any evidence of
turn-taking? The starling as an animal
model. Front. Psychol. 6:1416.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01416

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-taking in conversation appears to be a common feature in various human cultures
and this universality raises questions about its biological basis and evolutionary trajectory.
Functional convergence is a widespread phenomenon in evolution, revealing sometimes
striking functional similarities between very distant species even though the mechanisms
involved may be different. Studies on mammals (including non-human primates) and bird
species with different levels of social coordination reveal that temporal and structural
regularities in vocal interactions may depend on the species’ social structure. Here
we test the hypothesis that turn-taking and associated rules of conversations may be
an adaptive response to the requirements of social life, by testing the applicability of
turn-taking rules to an animal model, the European starling. Birdsong has for many
decades been considered as one of the best models of human language and starling
songs have been well described in terms of vocal production and perception. Starlings
do have vocal interactions where alternating patterns predominate. Observational and
experimental data on vocal interactions reveal that (1) there are indeed clear temporal
and structural regularities, (2) the temporal and structural patterning is influenced by
the immediate social context, the general social situation, the individual history, and the
internal state of the emitter. Comparison of phylogenetically close species of Sturnids
reveals that the alternating pattern of vocal interactions varies greatly according to the
species’ social structure, suggesting that interactional regularities may have evolved
together with social systems. These findings lead to solid bases of discussion on the
evolution of communication rules in relation to social evolution. They will be discussed
also in terms of processes, at the light of recent neurobiological findings.
Keywords: turn-taking, vocal interactions, conversation rules, mammals, birdsong, sturnids

Introduction
The Human “bases”
Vocal communication is widespread in the animal kingdom and vocal interactions are an important
part of social functioning. Temporal and structural regularities depend on the species’ social
structure, or may even depend on the immediate context. Two extremes are generally encountered,
with either an overlap superposition of acoustic signals between interlocutors or a strict alternation
September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 39

Henry et al.

of vocal utterances: a first emitter leaves a silent interval before
producing the following sound during which the second emitter
can respond. As in humans, animal vocal interactions may be
dyadic (“face to face”) or at the group level.
The question though is to what extent these regularities may
be functionally convergent with human communication rules,
such as turn-taking.
According to Logue and Stivers (2012), the analysis of
conversation in humans is based on methods and theories that
emerged from sociology in the 70s. One “founder” paper was
that of Sacks et al. (1974) who formalized the basics of turntaking rules and defined them according to eight characteristics
(see also Craig and Washington (1986): (1) only one person
speaks at a time, (2) the number of participants may vary,
(3) the order for speaker turns is variable, (4) turn size is
not fixed, (5) the content of speaker turns is spontaneous, (6)
simultaneous speech is infrequent and brief, (7) techniques exist
for repairing turn exchange errors, (8) turn allocation techniques
are used to regulate the exchange. The two major elements
are the alternation of utterances between interlocutors and the
avoidance of overlap, hence temporal features. In most human
cultures, overlap appears as a conversation failure (Sacks et al.,
1974) and can lead to the end of the exchange. In human
conversation, the fundamental frequency declines, changes in
gazing and other subtle signs are used to guide conversational
turn-taking (Gérard, 1987; Hauser, 1992). Another important
point is that conversational turn-taking rules are acquired during
development through adult modeling (Locke, 1993). It is even
considered as a child’s major achievement, which is made possible
by the early stages of parent-child interaction (e.g., Rutter and
Durkin, 1987). The mother is seen by some authors as controlling
the child rather than facilitating it in the mother-child dyadic
interactions (Miura, 1993). Adults may play a major role in
canalizing the flow of speech so that it is fragmented enough to
allow turns between speakers. Neglected children fail to develop
this ability, showing irrelevant turns, interruptions, simultaneous
talking and non-contingent responding (Black and Logan, 1995).
According to Calame-Griaule (1965), “In the Dogon society,
overlap with someone’s speech is a serious impoliteness: these
words that could not follow their natural way will be repressed
in the spleen. The spleen is the seat of grudge and humiliations.
Thus, accumulating repressed words can make sick.” Speech
has to submit to rules to become an instrument of social
communication. In general, “repair mechanisms exist for dealing
with errors and violations: stop prematurely or display even
rituals.” Overall, turn-taking allows interlocutors to enhance
mutual attention and responsiveness (France et al., 2001)
which may explain why overlapping/interruption is perceived
negatively, preventing the other’s turn to occur but also indicating
a lack of attention.
Overlapping may also reveal a person’s status for example. In
his work on Kirundi language in Burundi, Albert (1964) found
that the order in which individuals speak in a group is strictly
determined by seniority of rank: “the rule for servants, females
and other inferiors is to speak when spoken to but otherwise
to maintain silence in public.” Leaders talk more than other
individuals (France et al., 2001). Men are more likely to interrupt

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-taking in animals

than women which is generally interpreted as a male “power
demonstration” but could also be interpreted as reflecting distinct
male and female “subcultures” (Maltz and Borker, 1982). Turntaking shows a level of contextual adaptation: there is for example
variability in turn order, turn size, length of pauses according to
the number of individuals present (Sacks et al., 1974).
Apart from simple “politeness,” it is obviously difficult to
maintain mutual comprehensibility when participants talk at the
same time (Duncan, 1972).
In fact, turn-taking is a very general feature of social
interactions (games, traffic at intersections . . . ) (Sacks et al.,
1974). Turn-taking, “as an orderly distribution of opportunities
to participate in social interaction” has been considered, like
other such types of interactions, one of the “most fundamental
preconditions” for a viable social organization (Schegloff, 2000).
According to Sidnell (2001), such rules would correspond to
a species-specific adaptation to the contingencies of human
interactions, a view shared by Albert (1964) who suggested
that this type of interaction is not open to a great deal of
cultural diversification. Indeed it is found in a variety of
cultures: Thaï (Moerman, 1977), Creols of New Guinea (Sankoff,
1980), Dogon (Calame-Griaule, 1965) amongst others. Although
cultural differences are apparent in the duration of pause between
turns (the minimal pause under which locutors feel they have
been interrupted is about of 0.3 s in France, 0.5 in USA, 1 s
in Alaskan Althabascans, Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2001), avoidance
of overlapping appears in all types of languages as well as a
minimum gap between turns whatever the languages structure
(Stivers et al., 2009). More, within languages, variations in
the delay of response are predicted by the same factors such
as confirmation or disconfirmation responses or questioner
gazing at responder. Indeed, turn taking can be considered
as a universal feature within human languages (Stivers et al.,
2009).
In all cases, the respect for turn-taking rules requires attention
and control and may have evolved over time on the basis of
the first rulers who may have been the first to control their
vocal production and listen while being listened to MacWhinney
(2008). A Dogon saying is that “rules in language = law and order
in the society” (Calame-Griaule, 1965).
The universality of turn-taking in humans raises questions
about its biological bases and evolutionary trajectory. If it is a
species-specific adaptation to social requirements as proposed
by Sidnell (2001), there may be either some phylogenetic roots
to be found in our closest relatives (non-human primates)
or convergence in species with similar social contingencies
(Hausberger et al., 2008). Functional convergence (one process
of homoplasy) is a widespread phenomenon in evolution,
sometimes revealing striking functional similarities between
distantly-related species even though the mechanisms involved
may be different (Deleporte, 2002). One well known example
is birdsong, considered for many years now as the best
animal model of language development (Marler, 1970). Amongst
the parallels is the observation that both human language
and birdsong need to be learned from adult models during
development whether in terms of production, perception or
usage.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 40

Henry et al.

In what follows we will review the turn-taking literature in
primates, and the next closest groups which are the non-primate
mammals. Then, we will review how birdsong, a flexible type of
vocalization, can give rise to vocal interactions whether between
group members or territorial or social neighbors.

Coordination in Mammals and Birds’ Vocal
Interactions
While some aspects of these conversation rules may really be
human-specific (e.g., lexical aspects) and difficult to evaluate in
animals, other characteristics such as the influence of the number
of interlocutors, their social status, “cultural” (interpopulational)
differences, the individual’s life experience, and the influence of
its internal state on the temporal and structural organization of
potential turn-taking bouts, can be investigated in animal vocal
interactions. Both alternation and overlap (chorus, duets) occur
in animal vocal interactions.
In a variety of mammal social species, vocal exchanges occur
between a limited number of interlocutors, mostly 2 or 3
(dolphins Tursiops truncatus, Janik, 2000; Tyack, 2000; elephants
Loxodonta africana; Soltis et al., 2005; Campbell’s monkeys
Cercopithecus campbelli, Lemasson et al., 2010).
Non-human primates and other mammals may display
the three “classical” forms of temporal organization of vocal
interactions (duets, choruses and alternations). Thus, an
“organized” overlapping is observable when two sperm whales
(Physeter microcephalus) adjust their timing of “codas” (series
of clicks) production (Schulz et al., 2008) or in gibbons
who duet by synchronizing their vocalizations (male-female,
Geissmann, 2002; mother-daughter, Koda et al., 2013). The
extreme case is a chorus where a group joins in calling (e.g.,
bat spp., Kunz, 1982; Barbary macaques Macaca sylvanus,
Hammerschmidt et al., 1994; bottlenose dolphins, Kremers
et al., 2014; humpback whales Megaptera novaeangliae, Au
et al., 2000; chimpanzees Pan troglodytes Fedurek et al., 2013).
Alternation (antiphony) is however particularly common in the
social call exchanges of different species (bottlenose dolphins,
Janik, 2000; elephants, Soltis et al., 2005; Campbell’s monkeys,
Lemasson et al., 2010; squirrel monkeys, Masataka and Biben,
1987; Diana monkeys, Candiotti et al., 2012; Japanese macaques,
Lemasson et al., 2013; bonobos, Touitou et al., in revision;
white-winged vampire bats Diaemus youngi, Carter et al., 2008;
naked mole-rats, Yosida et al., 2007). The structure of sounds
is then adapted in that they are often short and produced
in sequences with a silent interval, longer than the call itself
thus enabling response without overlap. Interval between calls
varies according to species (generally 1 s or less but up to 30 s
in elephants) and temporal regularities may change within a
species: according to call types and their functions (Yamaguchi
et al., 2009), to the partner’s identity (Biben et al., 1986)
and distance (Sugiura, 2007) suggesting an adaptation to the
longer latency of response from a more distant partner. The
status of the emitter as well as its age are also important for
the selectivity of interlocutors within groups. In some species,
affiliated individuals exchange more calls (squirrel monkeys
Saimiri sciureus, Masataka and Biben, 1987; elephants, Soltis
et al., 2005; bonobos Pan paniscus, Touitou et al., in revision).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-taking in animals

In other species, the calls of older (Campbell monkeys, Lemasson
et al., 2010, Japanese macaques Macaca fuscata, Lemasson et al.,
2013; marmosets Callithrix jacchus, Chen et al., 2009) or higherranked (naked mole-rats Heterocephalus glaber, Yosida and
Okanoya, 2009) individuals will elicit more vocal responses.
Individuals can detect and wait for silent windows to vocalize
(e.g., cotton top tamarins Saguinus oedipus, Versace et al., 2008).
This alternation analytic perspective can be extended to nonvocal communication. Gestural signaling sequences can also
be considered as interactional projects that develop through
courses of action with comparable (<1 s) short delay between
requests and responsive moves in both human and non-human
primates (Rossano, 2013: Rossano and Liebal, 2014). It has
then been proposed that “conversations,” following turn-taking
rules, could even be detected in non-human primates (Snowdon
and Cleveland, 1984; Symmes and Biben, 1988; Hauser, 1992;
Lemasson et al., 2010). Thus, pygmy marmosets (Cebuella
pygmaea) call in sequence more frequently than expected
by chance, while the likelihood of an animal calling twice
before the other animal called once was less than expected
by chance (Snowdon and Cleveland, 1984). These findings
clearly demonstrated that the conversation rules were based on
social conventions and that the alternation of calling appeared
to be adaptive. This was confirmed recently using a coupled
oscillator model revealing dynamics such as those proposed for
human conversational turn-taking (Takahashi et al., 2013a). In
Japanese monkeys and vervets (Chlorocebus pygerythrus), Hauser
(1992) described a decrease of the fundamental frequency before
ending a call that could “guide” the turns. He estimated that
1/38 calls were interrupted when the exchange was between
adult emitters compared to 6/20 were when the individuals
were young. This observation suggests that the ability to
respect turns may be acquired during development. This was
confirmed by Lemasson et al. (2010, 2011) who showed that
young primates are 12 times more likely to interrupt turntaking by calling twice successively than are adults and by
Chow et al. (2015) who demonstrated that common marmoset
parents guide vocal turn taking development in their young.
In humans, self-monitoring is an essential ability for turntaking, fully developed only after 2 years of age (MacDonald
et al., 2012). In a study on parent-infant vocal interactions in
marmosets, it was found that only adults have the capacity to
self-monitor their vocal output and avoid call overlap (Takahashi
et al., 2013b). According to these authors the neural mechanism
underlying the development of self-monitoring could be
based on the interactions between three neural structures
(representing limbic, motor and auditory regions) with feedback
connectivity.
In many species, birdsong occurs mostly in Spring at breeding
time and is related to territorial defense and mate attraction
(Catchpole and Slater, 1995) and conveys information on
individual identity, distance, residency (Falls and Brooks, 1975).
It also occurs in the winter flocks and at night roosts for the
same species, at a time when they gather in larger groups. In
social species, song often occurs all year round and is produced
in the context of both intragroup and intergroup encounters (e.g.,
Brown and Farabaugh, 1997).

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 41

Henry et al.

In territorial songbirds, networks of neighbors, sharing song
structures, can be observed; they also react less aggressively to
each other than toward a stranger (Falls, 1982; see Catchpole
and Slater, 1995; Briefer et al., 2008) forming a “pseudosocial
structure.” Birdsong has long been considered as a male behavior,
but in many cases females do sing more than was thought (Riebel,
2003).
Birdsong interactions present a whole range of temporal
modalities: alternation is by far the most common form, but
duetting and choruses also occur.
Duetting is considered as a feature of a pair while chorusing
is a group activity (Catchpole and Slater, 1995): in white browed
sparrow weavers (Plocepasser mahali), the dominant male sings
a solo, the dominant pair duets, and the group performs
choruses (Voigt et al., 2006). Duetting can be antiphonal, or
overlapping and synchronized (Hooker and Hooker, 1969; Todt
and Hultsch, 1982; Trainer et al., 2002). It seems that most
duetting species are monogamous, monomorphic, sedentary and
that in about one third of the cases, duetting is antiphonal, one
third totally overlapping and one third variable between both
(Dahlin and Benedict, 2013). In Australian magpies (Cracticus
tibicen), choruses occur where the whole social group sings
together without clear coordination, in particular in the context
of intergroup encounters (Brown and Farabaugh, 1991, 1997).
Communal singing is one major characteristic of roosting
behavior, where choruses occur before the sleeping phase
(Counsilman, 1974). The functions of such communal singing
have been suggested to be a synchronization of activities, social
bonding, and group or territorial defense (Brown and Farabaugh,
1991; Foote et al., 2008).
Alternation is predominant and is based on a singing style
that ensures a silent interval after each emission, leaving space
for a response (Naguib and Mennill, 2010). In the winter
wren (Troglodytes hiemalis), 90% of the songs are produced
during interactions and the intersong interval is longer when
there is a vocal interaction than when the male sings solo
(Camacho-Schlenker et al., 2011). Receivers avoid actively
overlapping (Wasserman, 1977): in lesser skylarks (Alauda
gulgula), if two birds start singing simultaneously, one of them
stops within 2 s (Gochfeld, 1978, see also nightingales Luscinia
megarhynchos, Naguib, 1990). In playback experiments, birds
often start singing just after the playback in order seemingly
to avoid overlapping the next song (Searcy and Beecher,
2011).
Overlapping (one bird starts singing before the other has
finished, Todt and Naguib, 2000), may occur during these
interactions. In general, it stops the exchange: the first emitter
falls silent (Schmidt et al., 2006; Naguib and Mennill, 2010). In
black capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), dominant males
tend to overlap more which could reflect increased aggressiveness
(Ficken et al., 1978; Baker et al., 2012). In robins (Erithacus
rubecula) and black capped chickadees, overlapping excites the
overlapped interlocutor (Dabelsteen et al., 1997; Mennill and
Ratcliffe, 2004). It has been suggested that overlapping may be
perceived as a directed aggressive signal (Naguib and Kipper,
2005) or even a signal per se (Naguib and Mennill, 2010), but
more experimental evidence is still needed (Searcy and Beecher,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-taking in animals

2009). Alternation in birdsong exchanges suggests turn-taking
rules in that the timing allows turns to be taken between two
or more interlocutors, and overlapping elicits “irritation” or a
rupture of the exchange. However, we do not know how these
characteristics are acquired, what their real significance is and
how they are influenced by status or bonding. Social structure
may be a key factor.
Alternation requires discontinuous songs that leave space for
responses and indeed some “true” territorial species with long
continuous songs such as skylarks cannot show this alternating
pattern (Geberzahn and Aubin, 2014). Alternation appears more
in species with distant vocal interactions but social or “pseudo
social” types of relationships. Family or very cohesive social
groups are more likely to perform choruses.
Many species, such as caciques Cacicus sp. (Feekes, 1982;
Thieltges et al., 2014), nightingales (Sorjonen, 1983; Naguib
et al., 2002), five striped sparrows Amphispiza quinquestriata
(Groschupf, 1985), great reed warblers Acrocephalus
arundinaceus (Catchpole, 1983) have two categories of songs
that allow both temporal singing styles: a long continuous (often
quiet) vocalization often associated with intersexual interactions,
and louder, shorter and simpler songs that are more involved in
male-male encounters at a distance (Catchpole and Slater, 1995).
In summary, vocal interactions in animals are clearly
regulated, especially in terms of timing. Both intra and
interspecific variations are observed that hint at possible
evolutionary processes: more overlap and communal chorusing
in tight social groups, more alternation between distant
neighbors, with sometimes both types of exchanges in the same
species according to context. There are suggestions that temporal
regulation would depend upon both development and social
influences.
To date, there is a clear lack of targeted studies on particular
animal models where all these facets could be investigated. Very
few primate studies and almost no songbird study has considered
the context of these different types of exchanges together with
developmental issues, and even fewer are devoted to the cognitive
(perceptual) processes involved. Comparative work is also often
lacking, or draws on species other than those studied in terms
of proximate factors. To test the possible social bases for the
evolution of temporal aspects such as the turn-taking, we also
need to study species from a common phylogenetic lineage,
which differ in their social organization.
We will here try and tackle these questions on one songbird
species, the European starling Sturnus vulgaris, well known for
its vocal and social richness, and which has become one of
the classical animal models for song studies (e.g., Eens, 1997;
Hausberger, 1997). Comparative data from other Sturnid species
are now available.

Testing Turn Taking in an Animal Model: The Starling
European starlings are highly gregarious birds that form breeding
colonies of a few nests, which can be considered as the basic social
unit, especially in sedentary populations (Clergeau, 1989). They
forage in flocks from 10 to several hundred birds, and gather in
the evening at roosts where several hundred to several thousand
birds can be present (Feare, 1984). In all these contexts, song

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 42

Henry et al.

is produced (Adret-Hausberger, 1982). The males spend every
morning in their colony (all year round in sedentary populations,
in Spring in migratory populations), they visit their nest and
have vocal interactions with their colony neighbors, which are
generally from 5 to 20 m away. The colony membership tends to
be stable over time, although some birds may disappear and be
replaced (Adret-Hausberger et al., 1990). Neighbors are therefore
familiar. Males defend only the nest vicinity. Vocal interactions
between neighbors involve particular vocal structures which are
loud simple whistles that are produced with silent intervals
between successive whistles, intervals where responses from
other birds generally occur (Hausberger, 1991). As in all songbird
species, starlings produce both calls and song. Calls are short
and simple vocalizations produced in particular contexts for
which an immediate function can be identified. Birds produce
alarm calls, distress calls or flight calls, for example (Thorpe,
1961). Songs are more complex vocalizations whose functions
are not so immediately obvious. Songs are produced in social
contexts as well as breeding contexts. Starlings are able to produce
two different categories of songs: whistles and warbling (AdretHausberger and Jenkins, 1988; Eens et al., 1989). These two
categories of song are different in structure and in function as well
as in their pattern of acquisition (George et al., 2010). Whistles
are short, loud and stereotyped vocalizations that are produced
in a discontinuous way. By contrast, warbling is characterized by
its complexity and low intensity and consists of successions of
motifs (a fixed combination of acoustic elements) produced in
unbroken sequences for up to a minute (see also Chaiken et al.,
1993).
Whereas whistles can be produced independently, warbling is
often preceded by whistles and it then shows a clear organization
based on repetition of motif types and an increase in tempo and
frequency ending with clicks and followed by high-pitched trills
(Figure 1). Warbling is not used in alternating vocal interactions
and is mostly sung solo in the field. Playback experiments show
that the birds react to whistled structures by replying vocally

Turn-taking in animals

while they do not respond nor change their behavior when
warbling (pers. obs). The developmental course of these two
categories of songs is different (Poirier et al., 2004; Bertin et al.,
2007). Warbling develops progressively from subsong in the
course of the bird’s first year of life, whereas whistles appear
suddenly during the first winter around 9 month of age (AdretHausberger, 1989). Moreover, young birds raised without direct
contact with adults will not develop whistles but will produce
warbling song (Poirier et al., 2004; Bertin et al., 2007). Finally,
neuroethological as well as functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) studies performed on starlings revealed that
these two distinct categories of song are not processed in the
same way in the brain (George et al., 2008; De Groof et al.,
2013).
Here we will focus on the singing style that emerges from
the use of one or the other of these song categories, one
discontinuous and enabling alternating interactions, the other
continuous and hence not appropriate for turn-taking types of
interactions.
One other interesting feature is that these two categories of
songs have been found in other Sturnids such as the Indian hill
mynah Gracula religiosa (Bertram, 1970) or the wattled starling
Creatophora cinerea (Sontag, 1991) suggesting that comparative
studies within this family of songbirds could be promising for
understanding the evolutionary roots of the temporal regulation
of vocal interactions.
In the following section, we describe a series of observations
and experiments on the European starling, followed by field data
on other sturnids, in order to examine the different facets of
temporal regulation of interactions in one species in relation to
the four questions of Tinbergen (1963): causation (why do these
temporal features appear now and how are they processed?),
ontogeny (how did they develop at the individual level?),
function (what are their immediate functions?) and evolution
(what adaptations led this species to develop these forms of
interaction?).

FIGURE 1 | Song sequence of a wild starling. The typical song sequence starts with two different types of whistles (W1 and W2). The warbling sequence starts
with variable motif types (M1, M2 etc…) that can be repeated several times. Click motifs (CM) appear in the middle of the sequence. High pitched trill motifs (HPT) are
characteristic of the end of the sequence.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 43

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Hausberger and
Guyomarc’h, 1981
Henry et al., 1994
Unpubl.
Unpubl.
Hausberger and
Black, 1990
Unpubl.

January 1992

Hausberger
et al., 1995
References

AdretHausberger and
Jenkins, 1988

Paired

March 1979
March 1982
March 1979
March 1989 March 1992 March 1990
March 1990
Spring 1988

Rennes University Campus (F)

Dates recordings

Spring 1987

Paired

Nouvoitou (F)
Rennes (F)

Paired
Paired

Rennes (F)
Rennes (F)

Paired
Paired (2 0)
Paired

Seewiesen (Germ) Slimbridge (G.B)

None

Unpaired

Rennes (F)

Pairing Status

Auckland (NZ)

11 nests
Colony 2
6 nests
Colony 1
3 nests
3 nests
2 nests
1 nest
1 nest
1 nest
1 nest

WM6
CM1-CM4

WM1

WM2

WM3

WM4

WM5

Wild birds
Captive birds

Sites

For four males, their song had been recorded both when in
a mixed group in an outdoor aviary and while they were in
isolation in sound proof chambers When isolated, these males

Birds

Results
Individual adaptations to the social situation
(Appendix 1 in Supplementary Material)

TABLE 1 | Recording sites, social conditions for all the birds.

Song recordings from 21 birds were re-analyzed in order to
examine their singing styles (warbling/whistles). Data were
available for four adult males recorded in isolation in captive
conditions and 17 adult males recorded in the morning near
their nests in the field. Recording sites and dates are shown in
Table 1. More details about the recording conditions are given in
the references mentioned. Additional aviary recordings when in
a large mixed group were also available for the 4 isolated birds
(Hausberger et al., 1995) (Table 1).
All field recordings were made in the morning during the first
hours of daylight or during the two last hours when song is most
frequent during spring in the breeding colony. Most birds were
paired (most recordings are from sedentary populations). We
recorded only adult males which had visited a nest, and were
singing close to their nest. These recording sessions lasted one
to several hours. The colony size was noted: a bird nesting singly
or in colonies of 2, 3 up to 18 nests. Two nests were considered as
belonging from different colonies when they were more than 200
m. apart (Hausberger and Guyomarc’h, 1981). Since colonies of
6–8 nests, 9–11 nests, 12 and 13 nest and 14–18 nests showed the
same trends and the number of such colonies was low, we pooled
the corresponding data. The captive males had been caught on
Jersey Island. They were kept in sound proof chambers at day
lengths corresponding to the natural photoperiod. Birds had
water and food ad libitum (commercial pellets for turkeys, and
apples). Recordings were made continuously for 4 consecutive
days for each isolated bird. Recordings were made using different
tape, or cassette- recorders and microphones (see references).
Sound analyses were carried out on an Amiga microcomputer
(Richard, 1991). We considered that different elements belonged
to the same song bout when they were separated by less than
20 s. This was based on data on whistled sequences showing
that successive whistles within a sequence can be separated by
up to 12 s (Hausberger, 1991). A warbling sequence corresponds
to a succession of elements separated by less than 1 s (AdretHausberger and Jenkins, 1988; Hausberger, 1997). Since different
studies are summarized here, the recording times were different
for the different birds and therefore the absolute number of
bouts, warbling or whistle sequences could not be compared
between birds. This study was carried out in accordance with
the recommendations of European Communities guidelines
(European Communities Council Directive of 24 November 1986
(86/609/EEC). The protocol was approved by the local Ethic
Committee in Animal experiment of Rennes (CREA-07).

WM7-WM8

Methods

Isolation

Here we compared the singing style of European starlings living
in colonies at different social densities.

Social conditions

WM9-WM11 WM12-WM13 WM14-WM17

Promoting or Not Turn-taking: Does the Social
Situation Influence Temporal Features of Song?

Hausberger and Guyomarc’h, 1981;
Adret-Hausberger, 1986

Turn-taking in animals

18 nests Colony
3

Henry et al.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 44

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

3.1
8.3
13
11
6
1.8
1.5
2.4
1.5
1.6
1.4
2.1
1.6
0.8
1.3
1.3
Number whistle
sequence/warbling
sequence

1.3

60
100
100
0
20
96
60
89
65
85
71
67
67
63
100
88
Proportion warbling
preceded by whistle

67

3
1
1
0
2
7
18
6
9
18
16
11
16
32
27
28
21
Proportion of whistles
followed by warbling %

19 (6)
12 (3)
7 (2)
0 (0)
13 (4)
52 (24)
45 (9)
37 (16)
42 (11)
52 (11)
52 (32)
31 (14)
42 (18)
80 (33)
50 (39)
77 (36)

3.1 ± 1.9 2.7 ± 1.8 2 ± 1.5 2.5 ± 1.8 2.4 ± 1.6 2.9 ± 1.7 3.2 ± 3.3 2.9 ± 2.9 4.8 ± 4.4 6.2 ± 4.6 2.9 ± 1.8 7.5 ± 5.4 5.4 ± 4.2 6.1 ± 6.0) 5.9 ± 3.7 8.3 ± 8.4 6.8 ± 6.2
Number whistle per
sequence X ± sd

92 (110)
Proportion bouts including
whistles % (Number)

65 (71)

67 (81)
Proportion bouts including
warbling % (Number)

Proportion whistle
sequences followed by
warbling % (Number)

89 (31)
100 (25)
100 (27)
92 (22)
97 (30)
98 (46)
77 (20)
96 (43)
81 (26)
91 (21)
82 (61)
87 (45)
82 (40)
69 (43)
80 (78)

331
Total number of whistles

100 (47)

29 (10)
12 (3)
7 (2)
8 (2)
17 (5)
53 (25)
58 (15)
40 (18)
53 (17)
57 (13)
61 (45)
40 (21)
55 (27)
84 (52)
60 (58)

25

208
158

27
24

135
162

31
47

346
58

26
45

268
124

32
23

62
198

74
52

126
112

49
62

103

120
Total number of song bouts

77 (36)

WM3
WM2
WM1
Birds

TABLE 2 | Song characteristics of each individual.

- a decrease in the proportion of bouts including warbling
(Spearman test, N = 17, rs = −0.89, p < 0.0004) in relation
to colony size (Kruskall Wallis test, H = 12.5, n1 = 4, n2 = 4,
n3 = 3, n4 = 6, p < 0.0006).
- a decrease in the proportion of whistle sequences followed by
warbling (rs = −0.81, p = 0.001) with differences according
to colony size (H = 9.8, p < 0.02).
- a decrease in the proportion of whistles followed by warbling
(rs = −0.89, p = 0.0002) with differences according to colony
size (H = 12.9, p < 0.005).
- an increase in the mean number of whistles per sequence (rs =
0.83, p = 0.001) with differences according to colony size
(H = 10.5, p = 0.02).
- an increase in the ratio of the number of whistle sequences to
the number of warbling sequences (rs = 0.9, p = 0.003) with
differences according to colony size (H = 13.1, p = 0.004)
(Figure 3).

WM4

Clear differences appeared in the singing style of birds according
to colony size. As colony size increased, we found:

97

The importance of colony size (Table 2 and Figure 2)

146

WM5

WM6

WM7

WM8

WM9

Compared to the songs of isolated birds, field recordings revealed
a lower proportion of sequences including warbling (Mann
Whitney, n1 = 4, n2 = 17, U = 0, p < 0.002), a lower proportion
of whistled sequences followed by warbling (U = 0, p < 0.002)
and a lower proportion of whistles followed by warbling (U = 4,
p < 0.05) while the number of whistles per sequence was lower in
isolation (U = 1 p < 0.002). The proportion of whistle sequences
compared to warbling sequences was overall much higher in the
field as well as the ratio of the whistle sequences and warbling
sequences (U = 2, p < 0. 001) in both cases. Isolated birds and
wild birds in all situations did produce the same proportion of
song bouts including at least one whistle (U = 32, p > 0.05).

47

WM10

Isolation vs. field recordings (Table 2 and Appendix 1 in
Supplementary Material)

130

WM11

WM12

WM13

WM14

WM15

WM16

WM17

produced songs that included at least one warbling sequence
whereas whistles were not always present. Almost all (X =
92.53 ± 7.89%) whistle sequences were followed by warbling,
which was also generally preceded by a whistle (see Appendix 1 in
Supplementary Material). The whistle sequences were composed
of a very low number of whistles (mostly 1–3) (compare to
Hausberger, 1991). The proportion of warbling and whistle
sequences was similar for two birds but the two other birds
showed a higher number of warbling sequences than whistle
sequences. Thus, overall, warbling clearly predominated in this
context, given also its longer time duration.
When the same birds were observed in a group, they showed
a lower proportion of sequences including warbling (Xi = 98.1 ±
9.95, Xg = 65.42 ± 11.35, Fisher test for the 4 males, p ≤ 0.05),
a lower proportion of whistle sequences followed by warbling
(Xi = 92.53 ± 7.89%, Xg = 55.95 ± 15.31, Fisher test, p ≤ 0.05
for three out of the fourmales) and also a lower proportion of
whistles per sequence (Xi = 1.98 ± 0.48, Xg = 1.51 ± 0.29, ttest, M1 p ≤ 0.05 for the four individuals) (see Appendix 1 in
Supplementary Material).

35

Turn-taking in animals

211

Henry et al.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 45

Henry et al.

Turn-taking in animals

(see Figure 2) suggesting that the overall trend is accentuated in
extreme social situations.

Conclusion
Singing style is clearly influenced by the social situation in male
starlings. The more birds there are around them, especially
in the breeding context, the more they favor the production
of discontinuous songs, which is a prerequisite for alternating
vocal exchanges. In large colonies, male starling song showed
a high proportion of whistles, leaving much opportunity for
interactions and transfer of information between neighboring
males (Figure 4). Data from breeding sites where the birds nested
singly were similar to those obtained in isolated captive birds,
revealing that it is more the presence of potential vocal partners
than the presence of another bird (mate) that influences the
choice of a singing style. Comparison of the same birds in
different contexts revealed that there is an individual capacity to
adjust the singing style to the social situation.

Are There Temporal Regularities in Starling Vocal
Interactions?
Here the immediate responses of male starlings in terms
of temporal opportunities for response in the presence of
another individual and its interactional status were observed in
spontaneous interactions.

Methods

FIGURE 2 | Differences in song characteristics according to the size of
the colony. (A) % of bouts including warbling; (B) % of whistle sequences
followed by warbling; (C) % of whistles followed by warbling; (D) ratio
Whistles/Warbling; (E) number of whistles per sequence.

While all these comparisons were verified when colony sizes
were compared pairwise, the colony sizes 2/3 and 6 nests did
not show significant differences in most of the above mentioned
comparisons. Additional differences were observed between
colony size 1 and 11/18 for the percentage of whistles following
by warbling and the number of whistles per sequence (Mann
Whitney U = 1, P < 0.003 and U = 0, p < 0.005 respectively)

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Seven male starlings were observed in the same breeding colony
(4 in 2002, 3 in 2003) between March 17th and 27th 2002 and
between March 17th and April 15th in 2003 from 7 am (sunrise)
to 11 a.m. All were paired at that time of the year. The colony was
composed of 5–6 pairs. This study was carried out in accordance
with the recommendations of European Communities guidelines
(European Communities Council Directive of 24 November 1986
(86/609/EEC). The protocol was approved by the local Ethic
Committee in Animal experiment of Rennes (CREA-07).
Each full whistle sequence of the focal bird was recorded
until it started warbling or left. Two contexts of singing were
considered: 1- singing alone with no congener present in the
vicinity and 2- singing with another male silent or singing in the
vicinity.
Song recordings were made using a Sony TC D5 cassette
recorder and a Sennheiser directional microphone (MZA 14
P48) in 2002, or a Sony microphone (EMC 144) fixed on a
polyester parabola in 2003. Vocalizations were analyzed using a
computer (Unix Silicon Graphics Ind), and a custom-designed
sound analysis software (ANA, Richard, 1991).

Results
We plotted the intervals between successive whistles produced
by two different birds (Figure 5). More than half of the whistles
(56.4%) were produced within 2 s. We thus considered that
two whistles separated by 2 s or less belonged to a single
vocal interaction (see also Adret-Hausberger, 1982; Miller et al.,
2004). Eight hundred and thirty five whistles were recorded in
total.
The intra-individual interwhistle interval (IWI) clearly
increased when another starling was singing nearby (Xa = 4.7 ±

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 46

Henry et al.

Turn-taking in animals

FIGURE 3 | Correlation between the number of whistle sequences and the number of warbling sequences (rs = 0.9, p = 0.003).

FIGURE 4 | Song style of birds belonging to colonies of different size. Although the birds were recorded in very different conditions, a clear trend appeared
toward an increase in whistling (hence discontinuous songs) and a decrease of warbling (hence continuous song) with increasing colony size (= number of neighbors)
(From Hausberger, 1997).

1.3 s, Xns = 11 ± 1.6 s Wilcoxon, N = 7, T = 0, p < 0.02
(Figure 6A). Indeed, five of the seven males doubled this interval
and one quadrupled it.
For four of the birds, we recorded sessions when the neighbor
was silent: clear differences appeared again: the IWI did not
differ significantly between the solitary situation and the “silent
neighbour” situation (Xa = 4.3 ± 1 s, Xnst = 5.11 ± 0.65 s, Mann
Whitney, n1 = n2 = 4, U = 5, p > 0.5 while the IWI in the

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

“singing neighbour situation” differed from both (Xns = 10.68 ±
0.93 s, MW; alone/neighbor singing, U = 0, p ≤ 0.05 in both
cases) (Figure 6B). Only 133 instances of overlapping (second
emitter started before the end of the whistle) were observed, but
in 83% of the cases they were associated with the end of vocal
exchanges (first emitter became silent or flew away), which is
more than expected by chance (X 2 = 63.11, df = 1, P ≤ 0.001)
(Figure 6C).

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 47

Henry et al.

Turn-taking in animals

FIGURE 5 | Interval separating two successive whistles produced by two different individuals (overlap: when two whistles overlap). The arrow indicated
a break in the interactions after a 2 s delay.

FIGURE 6 | Song behavior according to immediate context. (A) Males increased their interval duration when another bird was singing (Wilcoxon, N = 7, T = 0,
p < 0.02). (B) Birds did not change their interval duration when another bird was present but silent and increased their interval duration when the other bird was
singing. (C) Most of the birds interrupted the vocal interaction in case of overlap (* : X 2 = 2256, df = 1, p ≤ 0.05).

Conclusion
It appeared that starlings take into account the social context
when they are singing. By increasing interval duration between

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

two whistles, starlings clearly leave space for other birds to reply
and therefore make turn-taking possible. Another element that
showed evidence of “conversation rules” in the starling was

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 48

Henry et al.

a response overlap between whistles from two males, which
appears here as “breaking the rule” and led to the end of the
exchange.

Developmental Issues: How Do Young Birds
Acquire an Appropriate Singing Style?
The impact of developmental conditions, both on the sensory and
social levels, has been tested through a series of experiments.

Normal Development
Young starlings like other songbirds develop their songs slowly
with distinct stages, starting with “subsong,” at the age of about
3 months: a long, continuous, disorganized vocalization where
the young bird is just practicing, and then a plastic stage where
elements of the future song appear progressively. It has been
suggested that subsong and plastic song are analogous to infant
babbling (e.g., Marler, 1970).

Turn-taking in animals

Also like other songbirds, starlings need to hear adult song in
order to develop normal songs (e.g., Chaiken et al., 1993). Little
attention has been paid in the developmental studies of starling
song or even other songbirds to how developmental stages might
affect turn-taking responses.
Field observations are almost impossible as the young
birds disperse and become nomadic after fledging (Feare,
1984), thus only some data from captive birds are available
(they are also difficult to breed in captivity). Monitoring
nine young males from birth to adulthood in an aviary
where they were kept with their parents confirmed anecdotal
reports from the field in terms of the timing of subsong and
plastic song but also revealed that the first whistles (hence
discontinuous songs) were produced in November, at the age
of 7 months. Until then, only continuous song was produced
although the plastic song starts showing some disruption
(Figure 7).

FIGURE 7 | Sonograms of song produced by young starlings during the first year. Top: subsong produced during the first summer (4 months old). Middle,
sequence produced at 6 months: click motifs are recognizable. Bottom: two whistles recorded at 7 months old.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 49

Henry et al.

Another pilot study on one young male raised without
adults but able to hear adult birds showed the same trend
with the first whistles appearing at the age of 9 months
(Adret-Hausberger, 1989). In all cases, the whistles appeared
suddenly and quite independently from subsong that seemed
to develop progressively into the adult warbling. We noted that
the first click motifs appeared in the subsong at 6 months
and subsong sequences progressively showed more adult-like
organization (Figure 7). It has been proposed in starlings
as in other songbirds that warbling types of songs (long
and continuous) could be an adult form of subsong (AdretHausberger, 1989).

Disturbed Ontogeny: The Importance of Adults
Sensory and physical deprivation of experience with
adults
Existing data on starlings raised without exposure to adult song
or contact with adult birds were reanalyzed in order to extract
information on their singing style. Four male starlings were
taken as nestlings (2–5 days old) and hand raised without any
contact with adults. They were kept respectively in groups of
inexperienced animals: 1 male with 4 females of the same age
(May 1993), 2 males and one female of the same age (May
1992) and one male amongst other clutches of 19 other males
and females (May 1981). Their song was recorded when adult
at 1 year old. This study was carried out in accordance
with the recommendations of European Communities
guidelines (European Communities Council Directive of 24
November 1986 (86/609/EEC). The protocol was approved by
the local Ethic Committee in Animal experiment of Rennes
(CREA-07).
Forty-five to 123 song sequences could be recorded from
each individual. None of them ever produced a whistle. They
all sang a continuous song that showed some similarities to
a “normal adult warbling” especially in its continuous type
of structuring (Figure 7). While separate motifs appear, the
intermotif intervals were, as in a normal adult song (e.g., Eens
et al., 1989) too short to permit a non-overlapping response
from another bird (X = 0.19 ± 0.18 to 0.59 ± 0.25 s)
(Figure 8).

Turn-taking in animals

Varying the type of contact with adults (Poirier et al.,
2004)
This experiment involved 26 young starlings taken from the
nest in April 1998 when 2–5 days old and then hand raised
for 2 months. In June 1998, they were placed in one of three
situations: eleven (5 males) were placed in groups of 3 or 4 in
three aviaries together with wild caught adult males in indoor
aviaries; 6 (4 males) were kept in isolation and 6 (4 males)
in pairs of inexperienced birds in sound proof chambers fitted
with loudspeakers that transmitted the sounds from the aviary
room (Figure 9). The isolated and pair raised animals could
thus continuously hear the vocal interactions that occurred in
the aviaries. This study was carried out in accordance with
the recommendations of European Communities guidelines
(European Communities Council Directive of 24 November 1986
(86/609/EEC). The protocol was approved by the local Ethic
Committee in Animal experiment of Rennes (CREA-07).
Their song was recorded when they were adults in 1999 after 1
year spent in this situation. The recordings show that all 5 males
raised in direct contact with an adult produced whistles while of
the others, only the two isolated males did so. They were also
those whose output showed the closest resemblance to adult song.
The pair-raised animals did not produce any discontinuous song,
hence separate whistles. They did produce some whistled notes
but these were included in a warbling sequence with no time
interval. They also had a very variable warbling song much like
juvenile subsong.
Because they had no other sensory stimulation, isolated
birds paid more attention to the adult song heard through the
loudspeaker and hence developed some discontinuous songs
(Poirier et al., 2004). It remains to be established if they will use
them in an appropriate way. Further studies seem to indicate that
the absence of adult contact during development prevents the
development of a normal singing style and proper use of song
types (George et al., 2010).
Appropriate social contact during development is thus
necessary and crucial in order to produce songs that enable
an alternating communication pattern. The birds raised in the
aviaries with one adult model nevertheless still showed some
abnormalities that pose questions concerning the importance
of the adult-young ratio. They formed mostly small same-sex
age groups that sang together with mainly overlapping vocal
interactions.

Testing the impact of the adult-young ratio (Bertin et al.,
2007)

FIGURE 8 | Intermotif intervals recorded for four young male starlings
raised without exposure to adult song or contact with adult birds.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Twenty male starling nestlings (6–8 days old) were taken from
the nest in April 2002. They were hand raised and were kept
as a mixed social group with 27 peer females until the age
of 2 months with no contact with any adult. In June, they
were allocated to three different rearing conditions: (1) dyadic:
one adult-one young, (2) group tutored: 7 young and 2 adults,
(3) group: 5 young birds together. The groups could hear but
not see the other animals (which were housed in the same
room), thus providing a similar auditory environment. This
study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations
of European Communities guidelines (European Communities

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 50

Henry et al.

Turn-taking in animals

FIGURE 9 | Experimental set-up: In the aviary room, young birds housed in the three different aviaries could hear and see each other. In the soundproof
chambers, birds were housed individually or in pairs. All the experimental birds received the same auditory exposure. Birds in the soundproof chambers could hear all
the songs from the birds in the aviaries via microphones and loudspeakers. (M, wild males; m, experimental males; f, experimental females; LS, loudspeaker; micro,
microphone; →, direction of auditory information transfer (from Poirier et al., 2004).

Council Directive of 24 November 1986 (86/609/EEC). The
protocol was approved by the local Ethic Committee in Animal
experiment of Rennes (CREA-07).
The song of the experimental animals was recorded and
analyzed when they were 1 year old. The results show that the
repertoire of whistles followed a gradient with fewer whistle types
in the group tutored than in the dyadic situation and almost no
whistles produced by the peer-only group (only 1 whistle type in
two of them).
When still in their developmental setting, both groups (group
tutored or not tutored) sang more (in time) than the animals
placed in the dyadic situation, but since their song repertoire was
mostly or only composed of warbling, they kept singing together,
overlapping without any temporal organization.

Brain Mechanisms and Plasticity: The Processing
of Song Categories and the Effect of Experience
It was hypothesized that if the two different song categories
(discontinuous/continuous) had a different functional
significance and as shown above, different developmental
trajectories, the brain processes involved should be to some
extent different. The following studies were carried out
in accordance with the recommendations of European
Communities guidelines (European Communities Council
Directive of 24 November 1986 (86/609/EEC). All the protocols

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

were approved by the local Ethic Committee in Animal
experiment of Rennes (CREA-07).

Song Processing in Wild Caught Adults (George
et al., 2004, 2008)
In a series of experiments on the processing of starling song
in the brain, we tested the electrophysiological responses of
field L (primary auditory area) and NCM (secondary auditory
area) neurons of awake restrained adult (wild caught) starlings
while they were exposed to a variety of species specific sounds
(whistles, warbling elements) and artificial sounds (white noise,
pure tones). Using a systematic approach to record neuronal
activity (George et al., 2003), we were able to record the activity
of almost 3000 neurons in the Field L and 2000 neurons in the
NCM from 6 individuals each time.
It appeared that the distribution and level of response
respectively varied according to the song category. There
was lateralization of song processing so that in Field L, the
whistles were processed more in the right hemisphere while the
warbling was processed mostly in the left hemisphere, revealing
a differential processing of these two categories of songs. In
the NCM, which as a secondary area, processes more complex
associative information (e.g., Chew et al., 1996), it appeared that
most neurons responded first of all to songs bearing individual
information, but both the proportion of responsive neuronal

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 51

Henry et al.

sites and the magnitude of the neuronal responses differed
according to the functional song classes. A gradient of response
was observed from the class 1 whistle (eliciting the lowest level of
responses), to the class 2 whistles and then warbling which clearly
triggered more responses than the two classes of whistles.

Conclusion
Since the brain processes functional categories of songs
differently and at different levels, it may trigger appropriate vocal
production and enable the bird, when hearing one song category,
to rapidly “decide whether or not” to reply.

How Can Social Experience During Development
Affect Brain Processing of Song Categories?
(Cousillas et al., 2004, 2006; George et al., 2010)
Responses of field L neurons of adult starlings raised without
adults (no sensory contact) using the same procedure as above
has revealed that the whole area (Field L) lacks the typical spatial
organization of normal adults and also the typical neuronal
selectivity toward specific song elements (Cousillas et al., 2004).
Social experience per se can evidently have as much influence
on the development of the primary auditory area as the
sensory experience in the experiment by Poirier et al. (2004).
Thus, both the birds raised in pairs or solitarily showed as
many abnormalities (lack of neuronal selectivity) as the sensory
deprived birds. The lack of contact with adults was obviously
sufficient to prevent proper development. Another intriguing
finding was that even the birds raised in a group with one adult
showed deficiencies, which seems to reflect their lack of social
bonding with the adult (Cousillas et al., 2008).
Similar findings were obtained at the NCM level: 10 young
birds were taken from the nest, hand raised, and then placed
in a large outdoor aviary where they could hear wild adults but

Turn-taking in animals

had no direct contact with any adult. Four months later they
were transferred as a group to an indoor aviary with no auditory
nor direct contact with adults for 12 months. These birds, when
adult, had a fairly normal song repertoire including whistled and
warbling structures. However, they did not produce sequences of
whistles as “normal” starlings do (Hausberger, 1991), and placed
them within warbling sequences which made them inappropriate
for alternating vocal interactions (Figure 10). Interestingly, the
electrophysiological recordings of the NCM neurons showed a
clear deficiency in processing song categories (George et al.,
2010). The lack of direct experience with adults despite a rich
auditory experience therefore induced a singing style that did not
promote alternation in vocal interactions despite the production
of appropriate structures. Since brain processes devoted to song
categorization were clearly affected, the birds probably could not
recognize appropriate times for replying.

Conclusion
Social bonding and hence selective attention may be a key factor
in developing the necessary brain processes and therefore the
ability to communicate in an appropriate way.

Turn-taking as a Social Adaptation: An
Evolutionary Process?
In the Eastern Cape in South Africa, four species of starlings
with different social systems offered an opportunity to test the
hypothesis that the temporal regulation of vocal interactions
would reflect their social organization. The red-winged starling
Onychognathus morio, pale-winged starling Onychognathus
nabouroup, African pied starling Spreo bicolor and Cape glossy
starling Lamprotornis nitens are widely sympatric in the region,
but range from solitary pairs through colonial groups to

FIGURE 10 | Song sequences produced by an adult (A) and by a 2 year old birds that did not receive adult tutoring (B). Recordings were made at the same
time of year.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 52

Henry et al.

communally-breeding species (Feare and Craig, 1999; Craig and
Feare, 2009):
- A territorial species: Onychognathus morio
The red-winged starling is a sedentary species. Monogamous
pairs remain together for at least three successive seasons and
are associated throughout the year (Rowan, 1955; Craig et al.,
1991). During the breeding season (October—March), pairs are
restricted to their breeding territory (approximately 200 m2 )
and very rarely join the flocks of non-breeding birds. Breeding
pairs are extremely territorial and intraspecific aggression is very
common. During the non-breeding season, both pairs and nonreproductive birds gather in flocks of varying sizes and spend the
night together in large roosts (Craig and Feare, 2009).
- A colonial species: Onychognathus nabouroup
Monogamous pair bonds of the pale-winged starling are
maintained throughout the year, and the birds apparently remain
together for several seasons. At the beginning of the breeding
season, male and female defend a small area around the nest,
but pale-winged starlings seem clearly less aggressive than redwinged starlings. Throughout the year, birds roost in small flocks
in groups on cliffs, with breeding pairs generally roosting at their
nest site (Craig et al., 1991).
- A “familial” species: Lamprotornis nitens
Cape glossy starlings, a mainly sedentary species, breed in small
family groups. Several monogamous couples nest in a same site
(September—February). Nests may be in tree holes or other
structures, and the same site is often re-used in successive years.
According to Craig (1983) and Craig and Feare (2009), up to
three birds, mostly young non-reproductive birds, help pairs to
care for nestlings. During the non-breeding season, birds may
gather in larger flocks of 10-20 birds to forage and share a regular
roost site.
- A “communal” species: Spreo bicolor
Throughout the year, African pied starlings live in flocks of 15–25
individuals. Stable monogamous pairs re-use the same nest sites
in successive breeding seasons (September—January). Several
nests can be found close to each other in burrows or holes. During
the breeding season, up to seven helpers can feed the young with
the parents, and helpers may feed young at three different nests
during a single breeding season (Craig, 1987). During the nonbreeding season, pied starling groups may be nomadic and join
other groups at communal roost sites (Craig and Feare, 2009).

Methods
This study was conducted in the Eastern Cape region in
South Africa where the four species occur, often at the same
sites. Songs have been recorded since 2003, mainly during the
breeding season. This study was carried out in accordance
with the recommendation of European Communities guidelines
(European Communities Council Directive of 24 November 1986
(86/609/EEC). The protocol was approved by the local Ethic
Committee in Animal experiment of Rennes (CREA-07).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-taking in animals

Red-winged starling vocalizations were recorded primarily on
Rhodes University campus in Grahamstown and in the vicinity
(2003–2004). Pale-winged starling vocalizations were recorded at
one site: Graaff-Reinet (2005). Pied starling vocalizations were
recorded at three sites: Table Farm, Queenstown and GraaffReinet (2003 to 2005 and 2008). Finally, glossy starling songs were
recorded at five sites: Thomas Baines Nature Reserve, Table Farm,
Salem, Kariega Private Game Reserve (all in the Grahamstown
area) and Queenstown (2003–2004).
From 2003 to 2005, a Sony TC-D5 Pro II tape recorder and
a micro-directional microphone Sennheiser MKH 70 P48 were
used to record vocalizations in the field. After 2005, we used a
digital recorder Marantz PMD 660 and a directional microphone
Sennheiser MKH 416 P48 (recordings made in 44.1 kHz/16 bits).
Most recordings were obtained in the morning (6–10 a.m.),
and in the hottest hours of the day (12 a.m.–15 p.m.),
corresponding to the peaks of activity of the studied birds (Feare
and Craig, 1999). According to Fry et al. (2000), both sexes sing
in all four species, despite the fact that, except for O. morio, males
and females are not distinguishable. Vocalizations were analyzed
using homemade software for song analyses (ANA, Richard,
1991). The amount of song recorded is summarized in Table 3.
Here we focused our analyses on the temporal aspects of
songs. Indeed, most studies on interspecific comparisons of
vocalizations have focused on quantitative aspects, such as the
repertoire size (Catchpole, 1980; Kroodsma, 1977; MacComb and
Semple, 2005). Whereas temporal aspects of vocal signals or vocal
interactions have so far been little studied, they nonetheless could
provide a wealth of information regarding the influence of social
life on the evolution of vocal communication. We predicted
that social life, in terms of the number of social partners or
distance between partners for example, would affect the temporal
structure of song.
We first estimated the proportion of discontinuous/
continuous songs. Two categories of songs could be
distinguished: discontinuous songs, corresponding to unitary
notes or short motifs (a fixed combination of acoustic elements)
produced at discrete intervals, and continuous songs in which
long sequences are produced, with less than 0.5 s interval
between two successive motifs.
For each species, we measured: 1- sequence duration, 2intervals between two successive sequences or two successive
discontinuous motifs, 3- the motif duration, 4- the number of
motifs per sequence, 5- intervals between two successive motifs
within a sequence.

Results
The four species showed clear differences in the temporal
organization of their song. Considering the proportion of
continuous and discontinuous songs, a gradient was observed
from O. morio, that produced only single song elements
(categorized as “whistles”) to S. bicolor that produced only
long phrases of continuous song (categorized as “warbling”). O.
nabouroup and L. nitens appeared intermediate, producing both
categories of songs (Table 3).
Interestingly, this gradient corresponded to the increase in the
complexity of social life (Figure 11): the more the species showed

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 53

Henry et al.

Turn-taking in animals

TABLE 3 | Song recordings for the four South African starling species and their song characteristics: temporal features (durations in seconds, mean ±
SD); proportions of discontinuous songs (DS) and continuous songs (CS).
O. morio
Number of individuals

O. nabouroup

L. nitens

S. bicolor
16

45

9

30

Total time of analyzed song (min)

6000

41

184

70

Total number of motifs analyzed

4500

1021

11,000

206

DS and CS song proportion (%)

DS

DS

DC

DS

CS

CS

100

16.54

83.46

5.43

94.57

100

Motif duration

0.76 ± 0.23

0.15 ± 0.001

Phrase duration

0.76 ± 0.23

0.15 ± 0.001

1±0

1±0

>1

>1

8.96 ± 4.58

2.99 ± 1.49

7.19 ± 3.68

Number of motifs per sequence
Duration between motifs
Duration between sequences

a complex and especially family type of social organization
(in terms of number of congeners and nest proximity), the
more their songs were produced in a continuous manner. In
the same way, for species that produced continuous song,
the phrase durations and the number of motifs per phrase
increased following the same gradient (ANOVA, F = 5.51,
df = 2, p < 0.0001; F = 89.82, df = 2, p < 0.0001
respectively).
On the other hand, the motif durations as well as the phrase
intervals decreased following this “social” gradient (ANOVA,
F = 11891, df = 2, p < 0.0001 F = 442, df = 2, p < 0.0001
respectively).
Song overlap was never observed in O. morio. On the contrary,
in L. nitens and S. bicolor, song overlap was very common and we
frequently recorded choruses of birds living in the same group
(Figure 12). Both alternating and overlapping song interactions
are also regularly observed in O. nabouroup.

Conclusion
The data presented here on one animal model reveal the interest
of focusing on one question (here the temporal features of song
that may or may not lead to alternating vocal interactions)
and examining the different facets of the question. To the
question: do European starlings show turn-taking in their vocal
exchanges between males?, we can, from both observations and
experiments, provide some answers: (1) they do favor alternation
over overlapping, in particular through an immediate adaptation
of the singer to the mere presence of another singing individual,
but also according to the social situation and social density; (2)
overlap does indeed disrupt the exchanges; (3) as in humans,
there is an influence of context: alternation predominates in the
usual interactions between males but chorusing can occur in
more communal and intense social contexts (e.g., roosts), (4) the
capacity for alternation develops during ontogenesis and social
deprivation during development results in the inability to sing
in a manner that favors “turn-taking” Social influences during
development may directly affect the development of the brain
processes devoted to song categorization.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

0.3 ± 0

0.29 ± 0.04

0.17 ± 0

0.7 ± 0

2.91 ± 4.29

3.19 ± 2.07

5.67 ± 1.91

2±0

6.92 ± 3.12

11.78 ± 7.89

0.08 ± 0.04

0±0

0.2 ± 0.04

0.13 ± 0.03

4.07 ± 4

2.28 ± 1.20

2.06 ± 0.8

1.79 ± 0.56

0.32 ± 0.06

While “turn-taking” is favored in the distant social
interactions between males, more continuous song is produced
in proximate interactions such as male-female interactions,
or exchanges between close social partners (Hausberger et al.,
1995). It has been proposed that warbling could play some
stimulating role on the physiology of the listeners but also on
the emitters too as found in budgerigars by Brockway (1969)
and Adret-Hausberger and Jenkins (1988). Warbling is often
associated with excitation behaviors such as visual displays and
the production of high pitched trills, especially in the breeding
season (Verheyen, 1980). As mentioned earlier, when producing
warbling, male starlings seem to be “unaware” of the stimulation
of their environment. Fundamentally, male starlings show
movements of the head, typical of observation, during the silent
interval between successive whistles and an erect posture while
they are more in an oblique posture, with or without wing
displays and a low reactivity while warbling.
In humans, it has been proposed that “attention is an intrinsic
motivation for all utterances in a conversation, independent of
the other possible motivation. . . ” (Sacks et al., 1974). Excitation
may lead to more overlap.
Interestingly, the comparative study of African starlings
reflects these findings: the more communal the species, the
more song overlap and choruses appear during close-range
interactions, and the more continuous the song. The more
territorial and long distant interactive a species is, the more
alternation there is, hence the more discontinuous the song
structures are. Some species like the European starling and
the pale-winged starling show both song styles, reflecting the
different contexts of interaction. Other species may also show
this relationship between the temporal features of an interaction
and the arousal states of the interactants: in barnacle geese
Branta leucopsis triumph ceremonies, females that “encourage
and support” their mate in the interaction will first alternate
calling but with an increasing tempo and then overlap and chorus
as excitation increases (Hausberger and Black, 1990) while those
that do not support their partner (older pairs) produce other
soft types of calls without any temporal synchronization (Bigot
et al., 1995). According to Hauser (1992), the timing of calling

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 54

Henry et al.

Turn-taking in animals

FIGURE 11 | Song sequence duration and sequence interval duration for the 4 species of African sturnids.

in macaques may be altered in such a way that it is used by
individuals to manipulate or facilitate social relationships.
One may speculate that the need for mutual intelligibility and
information seeking but also the need for giving and receiving
attention, a potential mediator of social bonding (Fedurek et al.,
2013) may have constituted the basis for the evolution of turntaking. Humans too may produce choirs that are perceived
as a communal display rather than an interaction between
individuals.
In the Dogons, as mentioned earlier, observing rules in
language coincides with law and order in the society (CalameGriaule, 1965). It is true too that spacing of the vocalizations
requires calmness, control and attention toward the others
instead of being self-centered. For France et al. (2001),
the non-verbal cues that accompany turn-taking demonstrate
mutual attention and responsiveness. According to Bourhis
(1982) and Hofstede (1980), some human societies are built
upon the development of “speaking well” while others, more
communal, favor the knowledge of the social relationships. This

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

is reminiscent of the gradient observed in species of the starling
family (Sturnidae). Other communal breeders and group living
animals such as the Australian magpies also favor choruses and
overlap of songs (e.g., Brown and Farabaugh, 1997). At the other
extreme, territorial skylarks have developed continuous songs
that prevent turn-taking: the challenger deliberately overlaps the
rival and “takes over” (Geberzahn and Aubin, 2014). This recalls
some human conversations where the dominant individual
disregards the other’s turn.
For Takahashi et al. (2013a), vocal turn-taking does not
require higher order cognitive capacities. Indeed the temporal
features of animal vocal interactions in many ways parallel
human communication. In particular, alternating vocal
interactions are present in a large number of songbirds
while cetaceans and primates seem to have “conversations” (e.g.,
Snowdon and Cleveland, 1984). However, as mentioned
by Snowdon (1982), “in no way do they approach the
complexity of human rules. . . they do indicate that rulegoverned communication systems are not unique to humans.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 55

Henry et al.

Turn-taking in animals

FIGURE 12 | Whistles of a male and a female O. morio (Top): whistles are separated by silent intervals. Chorus of L. nitens: several birds are singing
together and songs overlap.

The use of rule systems for vocal communication is not limited
to human beings.”
This review makes two additional points: turn-taking is one
characteristic feature of human conversations but choruses might
well be of interest if the social evolution of language and
the intercultural aspects are to be considered; more integrative
studies such as those described here (and in progress) for starlings
are needed in order to tackle the question of the evolution of
rule-governed communication in language.

Joubaud, Jean-Pierre Richard, Christophe Lunel, Pat Hulley,
Michael Ford, Arjen Van Zweiten and Tshifhiwa MandiwanaNeudani for their help. This research was funded by programs:
OHLL (CNRS), Cognitique (Ministère de la recherche), Studies
on African starlings were funded primarily by grants from the
CNRS (France) and NRF (South Africa) (CNRS PICS and LIA
programs), with additional funding from Rhodes University and
Rennes 1 University.

Supplementary Material
Acknowledgments
We thank Marion Coulon, Sandrine Alcaix, Hugo Cousillas,
Isabelle George, Cécilia Houdelier, Florence Rousseau, Françoise

References
Adret-Hausberger, M. (1982). Social influences on the whistled songs of starlings.
Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 11, 241–246. doi: 10.1007/BF00299300
Adret-Hausberger, M. (1986). Temporal dynamics of dialects in the whistled songs
of starlings. Ethology 71, 140–152. doi: 10.1111/j.1439-0310.1986.tb00579.x

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found
online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.
2015.01416
Adret-Hausberger, M. (1989). Song ontogenesis in starlings Sturnus
vulgaris: are song and subsong continuous? Bird Behav. 8, 8–13. doi:
10.3727/015613888791871278
Adret-Hausberger, M., Güttinger, H. R., and Merkel, F. W. (1990). Individual life
history and song repertoire changes in a colony of starlings (Sturnus vulgaris).
Ethology 84, 265–280. doi: 10.1111/j.1439-0310.1990.tb00802.x

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 56

Henry et al.

Adret-Hausberger, M., and Jenkins, P. F. (1988). Complex organization of the
warbling song in the European starling Sturnus vulgaris. Behaviour 107,
138–156. doi: 10.1163/156853988X00322
Albert, E. (1964). Rhetoric, logic and poetics in Burundi: culture
patterning of speech and behavior. Am. Anthropol. 66, 33–54. doi:
10.1525/aa.1964.66.suppl_3.02a00020
Au, W. W. L., Mobley, J., Burgess, W. C., and Lammers, M. O. (2000). Seasonal and
diurnal trends of chorusing humpback whales wintering in waters off western
Maui. Mar. Mammal. Sci. 16, 530–544. doi: 10.1111/j.1748-7692.2000.tb00949.x
Baker, T. M., Wilson, D. R., and Mennill, D. J. (2012). Vocal signals predict attack
during aggressive interactions in black-capped chickadees. Anim. Behav. 84,
965–974. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.07.022
Bertin, A., Hausberger, M., Henry, L., and Richard-Yris, M.-A. (2007). Adult and
peer influences on starling song development. Dev. Psychobiol. 49, 362–374. doi:
10.1002/dev.20223
Bertram, B. (1970). The vocal behaviour of the Indian Hill Mynah Gracula religiosa.
Anim. Behav. Monogr. 3, 79–192. doi: 10.1016/S0066-1856(70)80003-6
Biben, M., Symme, D., and Masataka, N. (1986). Temporal and structural analysis
of affiliative vocal exchanges in squirrel monkeys. Behaviour 98, 259–273. doi:
10.1163/156853986X00991
Bigot, E., Hausberger, M., and Black, J. M. (1995). Exuberant youth: the example
of triumph ceremonies in Barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis). Ethol. Ecol. Evol. 7,
79–85. doi: 10.1080/08927014.1995.9522971
Black, B., and Logan, A. (1995). Links between communication patterns in motherchild, father-child, and child-peer interactions and children’s social status. Child
Dev. 66, 255–274. doi: 10.2307/1131204
Bourhis, R. Y. (1982). “Language policies and language attitudes: le monde de la
francophonie,” in Attitudes Towards Language Variation, eds E. B. Ryan, and H.
Giles (London: Edward Arnold), 34–62.
Briefer, E., Rybak, F., and Aubin, T. (2008). When to be a dear enemy: flexible
acoustic relationships of neighbouring skylarks, Alauda arvensis. Anim. Behav.
6, 1319–1325. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.06.017
Brockway, B. F. (1969). “Roles of budgerigar vocalization in the integration
of breeding behaviour,” in Birds Vocalizations, ed R. A. Hinde (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 131–158.
Brown, E. D., and Farabaugh, S. M. (1991). Song sharing in a group-living
songbird, the Australian magpie, Gymnorhina tibicen. 3. Sex specificity and
individual specificity of vocal parts in communal chorus and duet songs.
Behaviour 118, 244–274. doi: 10.1163/156853991X00319
Brown, E. D., and Farabaugh, S. M. (1997). “What birds with complex social
relationships can tell us about vocal learning: vocal sharing in avian groups,” in
Social Influences on Vocal Development, eds C. T. Snowdon and M. Hausberger
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 98–127.
Calame-Griaule, G. (1965). Ethnologie et Langage. La parole chez les Dogon. Paris:
Galimard.
Camacho-Schlenker, S., Courvoisier, H., and Aubin, T. (2011). Song sharing and
singing strategies in the winter wren Troglodytes troglodytes. Behav. Process. 87,
260–267. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2011.05.003
Candiotti, A., Zuberbühler, K., and Lemasson, A. (2012). Convergence and
divergence in Diana monkey vocalisations. Biol. Lett. 8, 382–385. doi:
10.1098/rsbl.2011.1182
Carter, G. G., Skowronski, M. D., Faure, P. A., and Fenton, B. (2008). Antiphonal
calling allows individual discrimination in white-winged vampire bats. Anim.
Behav. 76, 1343–1355. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.04.023
Catchpole, C. K. (1980). Sexual selection and the evolution of complex song
among warblers of the genus Acrocephalus. Behaviour 74, 149–166. doi:
10.1163/156853980X00366
Catchpole, C. K. (1983). Variation in the song of the great reed warbler
Acrocephalus arundinaceus in relation to mate attraction and territorial defense.
Anim. Behav. 31, 1217–1225. doi: 10.1016/S0003-3472(83)80028-1
Catchpole, C. K., and Slater, P. J. B. (1995). Bird Song: Biological Themes and
Variations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Chaiken, M., Boehner, J., and Marler, P. (1993). Song acquisition in European
starlings, Sturnus vulgaris: a comparison of the songs of live tutored, tape
tutored, untutored, and wild caught males. Anim. Behav. 46, 1079–1090. doi:
10.1006/anbe.1993.1298
Chen, H. C, Kaplan, G., and Rogers, L. J. (2009). Contact calls of common
marmosets (Callithrix jacchus): influence of age of caller on antiphonal calling

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-taking in animals

and other vocal responses. Am. J. Primatol. 71, 165–170. doi: 10.1002/ajp.
20636
Chew, S. J., Vicario, D. S., and Nottebohm, F. (1996). Quantal duration of auditory
memories. Science 274, 1909–1914. doi: 10.1126/science.274.5294.1909
Chow, C. P., Mitchell, J. F., and Miller, C. T. (2015). Vocal turn taking in a nonhuman primates is learned during ontogeny. Proc. R. Soc. B. 282:20150069. doi:
10.1098/rspb.2015.0069
Clergeau, P. (1989). Estimation des effectifs d’étourneaux reproducteurs et
hivernants en France. L’Oiseau Rev. Fr. Ornithol. 59, 101–115.
Counsilman, J. J. (1974). Waking and roosting behaviour of the Indian myna. Emu
74, 135–148. doi: 10.1071/MU974135
Cousillas, H., George, I., Henry, L., Richard, J. P., and Hausberger, M. (2008).
Linking social and vocal brains: could social segregation prevent a proper
development of a central auditory area in a female songbird? PLoS ONE
3:e2194. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002194
Cousillas, H., Mathelier, M., Richard, J. P., Henry, L., and Hausberger, M. (2006).
Social experience: a major factor in the development of a central auditory area.
Naturwissenchaften 93, 588–596. doi: 10.1007/s00114-006-0148-4
Cousillas, H., Richard, J. P., Mathelier, M., Henry, L., George., I., and Hausberger,
M. (2004). Experience-dependent neuronal specialization and functional
organization in the central auditory area of a songbird. Eur. J. Neurosci. 19,
3343–3352. doi: 10.1111/j.0953-816X.2004.03376.x
Craig, A. (1983). Co-operative breeding in two African starlings, Sturnidae. Ibis
125, 114-115. doi: 10.1111/j.1474-919x.1983.tb03089.x
Craig, A. J. F. K. (1987). Co-operative breeding in the Pied Starling. Ostrich 58,
176-180. doi: 10.1080/00306525.1987.9633905
Craig, A. J. F. K., and Feare, C. J. (2009). “Family Sturnidae (Starlings),” in
Handbook of the Birds of the World, Vol. 14, eds J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, and
D. Christie (Barcelona: Lynx Edicions), 654–758.
Craig, A. J. F. K., Hulley, P. E., and Walter, G. H. (1991). The behaviour of
Palewinged Starlings and a comparison with other Onychognathus species.
Ostrich 62, 97-108. doi: 10.1080/00306525.1991.9639648
Craig, H. K., and Washington, J. A. (1986). Children’s turn-taking behaviours
socio-linguistic interactions. J. Pragmatics 10, 173–197. doi: 10.1016/03782166(86)90086-X
Dabelsteen, T., McGregor, P. K., Holland, J., Tobias, J. A., and Pedersen, S. B.
(1997). The signal function of overlapping singing in male robins. Anim. Behav.
53, 249–256. doi: 10.1006/anbe.1996.0369
Dahlin, C. R., and Benedict, L. (2013). Angry birds need not apply: a perspective
on the flexible form and multifunctionality of avian vocal duets. Ethology 119,
1–10. doi: 10.1111/eth.12182
De Groof, G, Poirier, C, George, I, Hausberger, M., and Van der Linden, A. (2013).
Functional changes between seasons in the male songbird auditory forebrain.
Front. Behav. Neurosci. 7:196. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00196
Deleporte, P. (2002). Phylogenetics and the aptationist program.
Commentary/Andrews et al.: Adaptationism—how to carry out an
exaptationist program. Behav. Brain Sci. 25, 514–515. doi: 10.1017/S014
0525X02310094
Duncan, S. H. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in
conversations. J. Personal. Social Psychol. 23, 283–292. doi: 10.1037/h0033031
Eens, M. (1997). Understanding the complex song of the European starling:
an integrated ethological approach. Adv. Study Behav. 26, 355–434. doi:
10.1016/S0065-3454(08)60384-8
Eens, M., Pinxten, R., and Verheyen, R. F. (1989). Temporal and sequential
organization of song bouts in European starling. Ardea 77, 75–86.
Falls, J. B. (1982). “Individual recognition by sounds in birds,” in Acoustic
Communication in Birds, eds D. E. Kroodsma and E. H. Miller (New York, NY:
Academic Press), 237–278.
Falls, J. B., and Brooks, R. J. (1975). Individual recognition of song in the whitethroated sparrow. II. Can. J. Zool. 53, 1412–1420. doi: 10.1139/z75-170
Feare, C. (1984). The Starling. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Feare, C. J., and Craig, A. (1999). Starlings and Mynas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Fedurek, P., Schel, A. M., and Slocombe, K. E. (2013). The acoustic structure
of chimpanzee pant-hooting facilitates chorusing. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 67,
1781–1789. doi: 10.1007/s00265-013-1585-7
Feekes, F. (1982). Song mimesis within colonies of Cacicus c. cela (Leteridae, Aves).
A colonial password? Z. Tierpsychol. 52, 119–152.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 57

Henry et al.

Ficken, M. S., Ficken, R. W., and Witkin, S. R. (1978). Vocal repertoire
of the blackcapped chickadee. Auk 95, 34–48. doi: 10.2307/
4085493
Foote, J. R, Fitzsimmons, L. P., Daniel, J., Mennill, D. J., and Ratcliffe, L. M.
(2008). Male chickadees match neighbors interactively at dawn: support for the
social dynamics hypothesis. Behav. Ecol. 19, 1192–1199. doi: 10.1093/beheco/
arn087
France, E. F., Anderson, A. H., and Gardner, M. (2001). The impact of status and
audio conferencing technology on business meetings. Int. J. Hum. Comput.
Stud. 54, 857–876. doi: 10.1006/ijhc.2001.0464
Fry, H., Keith, S., and Urban, E. K. (2000). The Birds of Africa, Vol. VI. London:
Academic Press.
Geberzahn, N., and Aubin, T. (2014). How a songbird with a continuous singing
style modulates its song when territorially challenged. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 68,
1–12. doi: 10.1007/s00265-013-1616-4
Geissmann, T. (2002). Duet-splitting and the evolution of gibbon songs. Biol. Rev.
77, 57–76. doi: 10.1017/S1464793101005826
George, I., Alcaix, S., Henry, L., Richard, J. P., Cousillas, H., and Hausberger,
M. (2010). Neural correlates of experience-induced deficits in learned
vocal communication. PLoS ONE 5:e14347. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.
0014347
George, I., Cousillas, H., Richard, J. P., and Hausberger, M. (2003). A new extensive
approach to single unit responses using multisite recording electrodes:
application to the songbird brain. J. Neurosci. Methods. 125, 65–71. doi:
10.1016/S0165-0270(03)00025-6
George, I., Cousillas, H., Richard, J.-P., and Hausberger, M. (2008). A potential
neural substrate for processing functional classes of complex acoustic signals.
PLoS ONE 3:e2203. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002203
George, I., Vernier, B., Richard, J. P., Hausberger, M., and Cousillas, H. (2004).
Hemispheric specialization in the primary auditory area of awake and
anesthetized starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). Behav. Neurosci. 118, 597–610. doi:
10.1037/0735-7044.118.3.597
Gérard, J. (1987). “La conversation et les tours de parole, ” in Savoir Parler,
Savoir Dire, Savoir Communiquer, ed J. Gérad (Neuchâtel-Paris: Delacheaux
and Niestlé), 33–57.
Gochfeld, M. (1978). Intraspecific social stimulation and temporal displacement
of songs in the lesser skylark. Z. Tierpsychol. 48, 337–344. doi: 10.1111/j.14390310.1978.tb00264.x
Groschupf, K. (1985). Changes in five-striped sparrow song in intra and intersexual
conexts. Wilson Bull. 97, 102–105.
Hammerschmidt, K., Ansorge, V., Fischer, J., and Todt, D. (1994). Dusk calling
in barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus): demand for social shelter. Am. J.
Primatol. 32, 277–289. doi: 10.1002/ajp.1350320405
Hausberger, M. (1991). The organization of whistle sequences in starlings. Bird
Behav. 9, 81–88. doi: 10.3727/015613890791749127
Hausberger, M. (1997). “Social influences on song acquisition and sharing
in the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris),” in Social Influences on Vocal
Development, eds C. T. Snowdon and M. Hausberger (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 128–156.
Hausberger, M., and Black, J. M. (1990). Do females turn males on and off
in barnacle goose social display? Ethology 54, 232–238. doi: 10.1111/j.14390310.1990.tb00799.x
Hausberger, M., and Guyomarc’h, J. C. (1981). Contribution à l’étude des
vocalisations territoriales sifflées chez l’étourneau sansonnet Sturnus vulgaris
en Bretagne. Biol. Behav. 6, 79–98.
Hausberger, M., Henry, L., Testé, B., and Barbu, S. (2008). “Contextual
sensitivity and birdsong: a basis for social life,” in Evolution of Communicative
Flexibility: Complexity, Creativity and Adaptability in Human and Animal
Communication, eds K. Oller and U. Griebel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press),
121–138.
Hausberger, M., Richard-Yris, M. A., Henry, L., Lepage, L., and Schmidt, I. (1995).
Song sharing reflects the social organization in a captive group of European
starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). J. Comp. Psychol. 109, 222–241. doi: 10.1037/07357036.109.3.222
Hauser, M. D. (1992). “A mechanism guiding conversational turn-taking in vervet
monkeys and rhesus macaques,” in Topics of Primatology, Vol. 1. Human
Origins, eds T. Nishida, F. B. M. de Waal, W. McGrew, P. Marler, and M.
Pickford (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press), 235–248.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-taking in animals

Henry, L., Hausberger, M., and Jenkins, P. F. (1994). The use of song repertoire
changes with pairing status in male European starlings. Bioacoustics 5, 261–266.
doi: 10.1080/09524622.1994.9753256
Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture Consequences. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Hooker, T., and Hooker, B. I. (1969). “Duetting,” in Bird Vocalizations, ed R. A.
Hinde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 185–205.
Janik, V. M. (2000). Whistle matching in wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops
truncatus). Science 289, 1355–1357. doi: 10.1126/science.289.5483.1355
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (2001). "Les cultures de la conversation," in Le Langage,
Nature, Histoire et Usage, ed J. F. Dortier (Auxerre: Editions Sciences
Humaines), 209–215.
Koda, H., Lemasson, A., Oyakawa, C., Rizaldi, Pamungkas, J., and Masataka,
N. (2013). Possible role of mother-daughter vocal interactions on the
development of species-specific song in gibbons. PLoS ONE 8:e71432. doi:
10.1371/journal.pone.0071432
Kremers, D., Briseño-Jaramillo, M., Böye, M., Lemasson, A., and Hausberger,
M. (2014). Nocturnal vocal activity in captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops
truncatus): could dolphins have presleep choruses? Anim. Behav. Cogn. 1,
464–469. doi: 10.12966/abc.11.04.2014
Kroodsma, D. E. (1977). Correlates of song organisation among North American
wrens. Am. Nat. 111, 995–1008. doi: 10.1086/283228
Kunz, T. H. (1982). “Roosting ecology of bats,” in Ecology of Bats, ed T. H. Kunz
(New York, NY: Plenum Publishing Corporation), 1–55.
Lemasson, A., Gandon, E., and Hausberger, M. (2010). Attention to elders’
voice in nonhuman primates. Biol. Lett. 6, 325–328. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.
2009.0875
Lemasson, A., Glas, L., Barbu, S., Lacroix, A., Guilloux, M., Remeuf, K., et al.
(2011). Youngsters do not pay attention to conversational rules: also in
nonhuman primates? Sci. Rep. 1:22. doi: 10.1038/srep00022
Lemasson, A., Guilloux, M., Rizaldi, Barbu, S., Lacroix, A., and Koda, H. (2013).
Age- and sex-dependent contact call usage in Japanese macaques. Primates 54,
283–291. doi: 10.1007/s10329-013-0347-5
Locke, J. L. (1993). The Child’s Path to Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Logue, D., and Stivers, T. (2012). Squawk in interaction: a primer of conversation
analysis for students of animal communication. Behaviour 149, 1283–1298. doi:
10.1163/1568539X-00003031
MacComb, K., and Semple, S. (2005). Co-evolution of vocal communication and
sociality in primates. Biol. Lett. 1, 381–385. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2005.0366
MacDonald, E. N., Johnson, E. K., Forsythe, J., Plante, P., and Munhall, K. G.
(2012).Children’s development of self-regulation in speech production. Curr.
Biol. 22, 113–117. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.052
MacWhinney, B. (2008). “Cognitive precursor to language,” in Evolution of
Communicative Flexibility: Complexity, Creativity and Adaptability in Human
and Animal Communication, eds K. Oller and U. Griebel (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press), 193–213.
Maltz, D. N., and Borker, R. A. (1982). “A cultural approach to male-female
miscommunication,” in Language and Social Identity, ed J. J. Gumperz (New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press), 196–216.
Marler, P. (1970). Bird song and speech development: could there be parallels? Am.
Sci. 58, 669–673.
Masataka, N., and Biben, M. (1987). Temporal rules regulating affiliative
vocal exchanges of squirrel monkeys. Behaviour 101, 311–319. doi:
10.1163/156853987X00035
Mennill, D. J., and Ratcliffe, L. M. (2004). Overlapping and matching in the
song contexts of black-capped chickadees. Anim. Behav. 67, 441–450. doi:
10.1016/j.anbehav.2003.04.010
Miller, P. J. O., Shapiro, A. D., Tyack, P. L., and Solow, A. R. (2004). Call types
matching in vocal exchanges of free-ranging resident killer whales, Orcinus
orca. Anim. Behav. 67, 1099–1107. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2003.06.017
Miura, I (1993). Switching pauses in adult-adult and child-child turn-takings: an
initial study. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 22, 383–395. doi: 10.1007/BF01068018
Moerman, M. (1977). The preference for self-correction in Thai conversational
corpus. Language 53, 872–882. doi: 10.2307/412915
Naguib, M. (1990). Effects of song overlapping and alternating in nocturnally
singing nightingales. Anim. Behav. 88, 1061–1067.
Naguib, M., and Kipper, S. (2005). Effects of different levels of song
overlapping on singing behaviour in male territorial nightingales (Luscinia

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 58

Henry et al.

megarhynchos). Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 59, 419–426. doi: 10.1007/s00265-0050066-z
Naguib, M., and Mennill, D. J. (2010). The signal value of birdsong: empirical
evidence suggests song overlapping is a signal. Anim. Behav. 80, 11–15. doi:
10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.06.001
Naguib, M., Mundry, R., Hultsch, H., and Todt, D. (2002). Responses to playback
of whistle songs and normal songs in male nightingales: effects of song
category, whistle pitch, and distance. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 52, 216–222. doi:
10.1007/s00265-002-0511-1
Poirier, C., Henry, L., Mathelier, M., Lumineau, S., Cousillas, H., and Hausberger,
M. (2004). Direct social contacts override auditory information in the song
learning process in starlings. J. Comp. Psychol. 118, 179–193. doi: 10.1037/07357036.118.2.179
Richard, J. P. (1991). Sound analysis and synthesis using an Amiga microcomputer.
Bioacoustics 3, 45–60. doi: 10.1080/09524622.1991.9753156
Riebel, K. (2003). The “mute” sex revisited: vocal production and perception
learning in female songbirds. Adv. Study Behav. 33, 49–86. doi: 10.1016/S00653454(03)33002-5
Rossano, F. (2013). Sequence organization and timing of bonobo mother-infant
interactions. Interact. Stud. 14, 160–189. doi: 10.1075/is.14.2.02ros
Rossano, F., and Liebal, K. (2014). “Requests” and “offers” in orangutans and
human infants,” in Requesting in Social Interaction, eds P. Drew and E. CouperKuhlen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 333–362.
Rowan, M. K. (1955).The breeding biology and behaviour of the
redwinged starling Onychognathus morio. Ibis 97, 663–705. doi:
10.1111/j.1474-919X.1955.tb01926.x
Rutter, D. R., and Durkin, K. (1987). Turn-taking in mother-infant interaction:
an examination of vocalization and gaze. Dev. Psychol. 23, 54–61. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.23.1.54
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematic for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.1353/lan.1974.0010
Sankoff, G. (1980). “Multilingualism in Papua New Guinea,” in Social Life of
Language, ed G. Sankoff (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press),
95–132.
Schegloff, E. A. (2000). Overlapping table and the organization of turn-taking for
conversation. Lang. Soc. 29, 1–63. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500001019
Schmidt, R., Kunc, H. P., Amrhein, V., and Naguib, M. (2006). Responses to
interactive playback predict future pairing success in nightingales. Anim. Behav.
72, 1355–1362. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.03.022
Schulz, T. M., Whitehead, H., Gero, S., and Rendell, L. (2008). Overlapping
and matching of codas in vocal interactions between sperm whales:
insights into communication function. Anim. Behav. 76, 1977–1988. doi:
10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.07.032
Searcy, W. A., and Beecher, M. D. (2009). Song as an aggressive signal in songbirds.
Anim. Behav. 78, 1281–1292. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.08.011
Searcy, W. A., and Beecher, M. D. (2011). Continued scepticism
that song overlapping is a signal. Anim. Behav. 81, e1–e4. doi:
10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.10.013
Sidnell, J. (2001). Conversational turn-taking in a Caribbean English Creole.
J. Pragmatics 33, 1263–1290. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00062-X
Snowdon, C. T. (1982). “Linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to primate
communication,” in Primate Communication, eds C. T. Snowdon, C. H. Brown,
and M. R. Pedersen, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press),
212–238.
Snowdon, C. T., and Cleveland, J. (1984). “Conversations” among pygmy
marmosets. Am. J. Primatol. 7, 15–20. doi: 10.1002/ajp.1350070104
Soltis, J., Leong, K., and Savage, A. (2005). African elephant vocal communication
I: antiphonal calling behaviour among affiliated females. Anim. Behav. 70,
579–587. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2004.11.015
Sontag, W. A. (1991). Habitatsunterschiede, Balzverhaten, Paarbildung und
Parbindung beim Lappenstar Creatophora cinerea. Acta Biol. Benrodi 3,
99–114.
Sorjonen, J. (1983). Transmission of the two most characteristic phrases of the song
of the thrush nightingale Luscina luscina in different environmental conditions.
Ornis Scand. 14, 278–288. doi: 10.2307/3676320

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-taking in animals

Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Sugiura, H. (2007). Adjustment of temporal call usage during vocal exchange of
coo calls in Japanese macaques. Ethology 113, 528–533. doi: 10.1111/j.14390310.2007.01349.x
Symmes, D., and Biben, M. (1988). “Conversational vocal exchanges un squirrel
monkeys,” in Primate Vocal Communication, eds D. Todt, P. Goedeking, and
D. Symmes (Berlin: Springer), 123–132.
Takahashi, D. Y., Narayanan, D., and Ghazanfar, A. A. (2013b). “Development of
self-monitoring essential for vocal interactions in marmoset monkeys,” in IEEE
Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (Osaka).
Takahashi, D. Y., Narayanan, D. Z., and Ghazanfar, A. A. (2013a). Coupled
oscillator dynamics of vocal turn-taking in monkeys. Curr. Biol. 23, 2162–2168.
doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.005
Thieltges, H., Henry, L., Biquand, V., and Deleporte, P. (2014). Short-term
variations of dialects in short songs of two species of colonial caciques (Cacicus).
Acta Acustica United Acustica 100, 759–766. doi: 10.3813/AAA.918755
Thorpe, W. H. (1961). Bird Song. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Z. Tierpsychol. 20,
410–433. doi: 10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x
Todt, D., and Hultsch, H. (1982). Impairment of vocal signal exchange in the
monogamous duet-singer Cossypha heuglini (Turdidae): effects of pairbond
maintenance. Ethology 60, 265–274.
Todt, D., and Naguib, M. (2000). Vocal interactions in birds: the use of song as a
model in communication. Adv. Study Behav. 29, 247–296. doi: 10.1016/S00653454(08)60107-2
Trainer, J. M., McDonald, D. B., and Learn, W. A. (2002). The development of
coordinated singing in cooperatively displaying long-tailed manakins. Behav.
Ecol. 13, 65–69. doi: 10.1093/beheco/13.1.65
Tyack, P. L. (2000). Dolphins whistle: a signature tune. Science 289, 1310–1311.
doi: 10.1126/science.289.5483.1310
Verheyen, R. F. (1980). “Breeding strategies of the starling,” in Bird Problems in
Agriculture, eds E. N. Wright, I. R. Inglis, and C. J. Feare (Croydon, UK: British
Crop Protection Council), 69–82.
Versace, E., Endress, A. D., and Hauser, M. D. (2008). Pattern recognition
mediates flexible timing of vocalizations in nonhuman primates:
experiments with cottontop tamarins. Anim. Behav. 76, 1885–1892. doi:
10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.08.015
Voigt, C., Leitner, S., and Gahr, M. (2006). Repertoire and structure of duet and
solo songs in cooperatively breeding white-browed sparrow weavers. Behaviour
143, 159–182. doi: 10.1163/156853906775900739
Wasserman, F. E. (1977). Intraspecific acoustical interference in the Whitethroated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). Anim. Behav. 25, 949–952. doi:
10.1016/0003-3472(77)90045-8
Yamaguchi, C., Izumi, A., and Nakamura, K. (2009). Temporal rules in vocal
exchanges of phees and trills in common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus). Am. J.
Primatol. 71, 617–622. doi: 10.1002/ajp.20697
Yosida, S., Kobayasi, K. I., Ikebuchi, M., Ozaki, R., and Okanoya, K. (2007).
Antiphonal Vocalization of a Subterranean Rodent, the Naked MoleRat (Heterocephalus glaber). Ethology 113, 703–710. doi: 10.1111/j.14390310.2007.01371.x
Yosida, S., and Okanoya, K. (2009). Naked mole−rat is sensitive to social hierarchy
encoded in antiphonal vocalization. Ethology 115, 823–831. doi: 10.1111/j.14390310.2009.01677.x
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Henry, Craig, Lemasson and Hausberger. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC
BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution
or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1416 | 59

CORRECTION
published: 16 December 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01924

Corrigendum: Social coordination in
animal vocal interactions. Is there
any evidence of turn-taking? The
starling as an animal model
Laurence Henry 1*, Adrian J. F. K. Craig 2 , Alban Lemasson 1, 3 and Martine Hausberger 1
1
Laboratoire d’éthologie animale et humaine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 6552, Université de
Rennes 1, Rennes, France, 2 Department of Zoology and Entomology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa,
3
Laboratoire d’éthologie animale et humaine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 6552, Station Biologique,
Université de Rennes 1, Paimpont, France

Keywords: turn-taking, vocal interactions, conversation rules, mammals, birdsong, sturnids

A corrigendum on:
Social coordination in animal vocal interactions. Is there any evidence of turn-taking? The
starling as an animal model
by Henry, L., Craig, A. J. F. K., Lemasson, A., and Hausberger, M. (2015). Front. Psychol. 6:1416. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01416
Figure 3 of the article by Henry et al. (2015) contained a minor error, which we correct here.

Edited and reviewed by:
Marisa Casillas,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
*Correspondence:
Laurence Henry
lhenry@univ-rennes1.fr
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 22 October 2015
Accepted: 30 November 2015
Published: 16 December 2015
Citation:
Henry L, Craig AJFK, Lemasson A and
Hausberger M (2015) Corrigendum:
Social coordination in animal vocal
interactions. Is there any evidence of
turn-taking? The starling as an animal
model. Front. Psychol. 6:1924.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01924

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

FIGURE 3 | Whistle sequences/warbling sequences ratio according to the number of nests per colony
(rs = 0.9, p = 0.003). Starlings produce more discontinuous song (whistles) when the number of neighbors is high
(dense colonies).

Figure captions 4, 5, and 12 contained minor errors, which we correct here.
Figure 4. Song style of birds belonging to colonies of different sizes. Although the birds were
recorded in very different conditions, a clear trend appeared toward an increase in whistling (hence
discontinuous songs) and a decrease of warbling (hence continuous song) with increasing colony
size (= number of neighbors). X: mean number of whistles per sequence (From Hausberger, 1997).

December 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1924 | 60

Henry et al.

Figure 5. Intervals separating two successive whistles produced
by two different individuals during vocal interaction (overlap:
when two whistles overlap). Most whistling exchanges show
an interval of 2 s or less between the first and second
whistle (arrow).
Figure 12. Whistles of a male and a female O. morio (Top):
whistles are separated by silent intervals. Choruses of L. nitens:
several birds singing together with their songs in overlap.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-Taking in Animals

Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Henry, Craig, Lemasson and Hausberger. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC
BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution
or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

December 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1924 | 61

ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
published: 02 February 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00089

Anticipation in turn-taking: mechanisms and information
sources
Carina Riest*, Annett B. Jorschick and Jan P. de Ruiter
Faculty for Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Edited by:
Kobin H. Kendrick, Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Martin John Pickering, University of
Edinburgh, UK
Sara Bögels, Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
*Correspondence:
Carina Riest, Faculty for Linguistics
and Literary Studies, Bielefeld
University, PF 100131, 33615
Bielefeld, Germany
e-mail: carina.groos@uni-bielefeld.de

During conversations participants alternate smoothly between speaker and hearer roles
with only brief pauses and overlaps. There are two competing types of accounts about
how conversationalists accomplish this: (a) the signaling approach and (b) the anticipatory
(‘projection’) approach. We wanted to investigate, first, the relative merits of these two
accounts, and second, the relative contribution of semantic and syntactic information to
the timing of next turn initiation. We performed three button-press experiments using
turn fragments taken from natural conversations to address the following questions: (a)
Is turn-taking predominantly based on anticipation or on reaction, and (b) what is the
relative contribution of semantic and syntactic information to accurate turn-taking. In our
first experiment we gradually manipulated the information available for anticipation of the
turn end (providing information about the turn end in advance to completely removing
linguistic information). The results of our first experiment show that the distribution of the
participants’ estimation of turn-endings for natural turns is very similar to the distribution
for pure anticipation. We conclude that listeners are indeed able to anticipate a turn-end
and that this strategy is predominantly used in turn-taking. In Experiment 2 we collected
purely reacted responses. We used the distributions from Experiments 1 and 2 together
to estimate a new dependent variable called Reaction Anticipation Proportion. We used
this variable in our third experiment where we manipulated the presence vs. absence of
semantic and syntactic information by low-pass filtering open-class and closed class words
in the turn. The results suggest that for turn-end anticipation, both semantic and syntactic
information are needed, but that the semantic information is a more important anticipation
cue than syntactic information.
Keywords: turn-taking, timing, anticipation, reaction, conversation

INTRODUCTION
Participants in a conversation have a number of tasks that they
have to perform simultaneously. They have to comprehend the
speaker’s utterance while at the same time they need to prepare
their response to that utterance, preferably before the current
speaker ends their turn. Despite the complexity of these processes the alternation between the speaker and the hearer roles is
generally timed with only short pauses and overlaps (Sacks et al.,
1974). This conversational phenomenon is an important part of
the turn-taking organization.
There are two competing main approaches providing an explanation for the turn-taking organization: the anticipatory approach,
in which it is assumed that participants are able to predict the
end of a turn in advance, and the signaling approach, which
assumes that listeners perceive specific signals to detect the end of a
turn.
The aim of this study was first to determine the relative contribution of these two proposed mechanisms to turn-taking and
second, to investigate which linguistic information sources listeners predominantly use for end-of-turn anticipation. To this
end, we conducted a series of button-press experiments with turns
from natural conversations while manipulating both the respective
critical information sources and the task.

www.frontiersin.org

The anticipatory approach argues that the precise timing in
conversations can only be explained by the listeners’ ability to
make accurate predictions about the end of the speaker’s utterances. Depending on the assumed anticipatory model listeners
use various kinds of information to anticipate. The first to
claim that listeners are able to anticipate a turn ending were
Sacks et al. (1974). In their famous and often-cited turn-taking
model they provide an explanation for the characteristic smooth
speaker transitions in natural conversation. According to their
model, turns consist of syntactic building blocks called turnconstructional units. Listeners are able to predict the end of a
turn-constructional unit. At this point a speaker change becomes
relevant. This point in time is called a transition-relevance place.
When a turn arrives at a transition-relevance place it is possible (a) for the current speaker to select another speaker, or (b)
for another speaker to self-select and start talking. If neither
option (a) nor (b) is used the current speaker can produce another
turn.
In contrast, the signaling approach assumes that turn transitions are regulated by an exchange of conventional vocal or gestural
signals (e.g., Yngve, 1970). So in this approach, participants in a
conversation do not anticipate these signals but react to them after
having perceived them. Influential proponents of the signaling

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 62

Riest et al.

approach who did numerous studies on finding explicit turn taking
signals are Duncan (1972, 1973), Duncan and Niederehe (1974),
and Duncan and Fiske (1977). They assume that there exist definite
signals that are displayed and responded to according to specific
rules. According to Duncan (1972) such signals are composed of
one or more of six behavioral cues: (1) any phrase-final intonation other than sustained, intermediate pitch level, (2) drawl on the
final syllable or on the stressed syllable of a terminal clause, (3) the
termination of any hand gesticulation, (4) sociocentric sequences
(stereotyped expressions like “you know,” “isn’t it,” etc.), (5) drop
in pitch and/or loudness in conjunction with one of the sociocentric expressions, or (6) termination of a grammatical clause.
According to Duncan and Fiske (1977) speakers always produce at
least one of these turn transition cues at the end of their turn, to
which listeners react by initiating their next turn. The more cues
a speaker produces the more likely a change of speaker role is at
that point.
The standard argument against the signaling approach is that
the relevant cues occur too late in the speaker’s turn to enable
timely speaker changes. As a counter-argument, Heldner and
Edlund (2010) note that the timing of floor changes is not as
precise as it is often claimed. In their analysis of three different
conversational corpora 41–45% of between-speaker intervals were
longer than 200 ms. They claim that these intervals are potentially long enough for people to react to end-of-turn signals. Their
argumentation is based on the distribution of observed delays
and pauses in conversational turn-transfers. In their view, pauses
longer than 200 ms could also plausibly be explained by assuming
they were reactions to signals (p. 566), while pauses shorter than
200 ms could correspond to anticipation (55–59% of the turn
transitions in the investigated corpora). Their reaction threshold
explanation is based on minimal response times, which were investigated under maximally favorable conditions. Their argument
for this strict threshold is that interlocutors are highly trained
to recognize gaps, when they can start their turn. But even if
one assumes higher thresholds reaching up to 600 ms (Jescheniak
et al., 2003; Indefrey and Levelt, 2004; Schnur et al., 2006) Heldner
and Edlund (2010) argue that the proportion of responses which
can be explained by reaction would be lower, but would not be
eliminated.
We want to suggest that the presence of gaps longer than
200 ms does not necessarily mean that the turn before the gap
was reacted to. Speakers often intentionally delay the production of so-called ‘dispreferred’ responses, which leads to longer
pauses (see, e.g., Levinson, 1983; Kendrick and Torreira, 2014).
So pauses longer than 200 ms are not necessarily caused by reaction, but can also be caused by an anticipated response that was
nevertheless intentionally delayed. Conversely, response times of
shorter than 200 ms need not always be caused by anticipation,
but can be early reactions to perceived signals (false alarms).
Hence, using a fixed cut-off value does not give us an accurate
estimate of the relative number of anticipated and reacted turn
transitions.
One possible criticism regarding the anticipatory approach is
that Sacks et al. (1974) do not explain the mechanism responsible
for anticipation, and more specifically, which information listeners
use to‘project’ when a turn is going to end (Sacks et al., 1974; Power

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Anticipation in turn-taking

and Dal Martello, 1986; O’Connell et al., 1990). Sacks et al. (1974)
present only observational evidence suggesting that syntax and
intonation play an important role in this process. But in the last
decade possible mechanisms of turn-end anticipation have been
investigated in more depth.
To investigate the role of intonational contour and lexicosyntactic cues in end-of-turn anticipation De Ruiter et al. (2006)
performed a button press experiment presenting turns taken from
natural Dutch conversations to participants. The instruction was
to press a button when they thought the turn was going to end.
They presented unaltered turns as well as manipulated turns
where the lexico-syntactic information was absent but the intonational contour remained intact and vice versa. The intonational
contour was manipulated by completely flattening the pitch leaving duration, rhythm and intensity intact. The lexico-syntactic
information was manipulated by low-pass filtering the original
turn fragment. In this way, words could no longer be identified, but the pitch contour remained intact. The results show
that for unaltered turns, the average response time was about
200 ms before the turn was finished. This indicates that rather
than waiting for the end of the turn and then react, the participants tried to anticipate the turn ending. With intonation
contour absent but intact lexico-syntactic information, the participants were still able to accurately anticipate the turn ending.
But the anticipation accuracy deteriorated significantly in absence
of the lexico-syntactic information. The authors concluded that
the lexico-syntactic structure is necessary (and perhaps even sufficient) for accurate end-of-turn projection. They suggested that
the syntactic structure provides constraining information about
the upcoming words and serves as a temporal resource for the listeners to monitor the unfolding turn. An important difference
between the task used by De Ruiter et al. (2006) and turntaking in natural communication is that listeners do not need
to prepare and produce an utterance. This actually led to more
accurate responses in the experiment compared to the responses
in the natural conversations from which the experimental stimuli were culled. Hence, we believe that the results from this
methodology are at least qualitatively generalizable to the natural
situation.
Keitel et al. (2013) used eye-tracking methodology to investigate the influence of semantic content and intonation on anticipation ability during development. They presented recordings
of actors performing conversations to three different age groups
(prelinguistic 6–12 months, linguistic 24–36 months, adults) while
measuring their gaze. The conversations were presented either
with normal or flattened intonation. If a gaze was shifted from the
current to the next speaker at least 500 ms before the end of the
current turn, it was considered anticipatory. But if the gaze shifted
after the listener began to speak the gaze shift was coded as reactive.
The results showed that in contrast to younger infants, children
at the age of three are already able to reliably anticipate the end
of turns. Furthermore, intonation influenced anticipation only in
this specific age group, suggesting that at that age they rely more
strongly on intonational information for anticipation than adults.
The authors explained this finding by noting that the syntactic and
semantic competence of the 3-year-olds is not yet adult-like. This
is in line with the finding that adults tend to rely on prosody for the

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 63

Riest et al.

detection of turn-ends only when neither semantic nor syntactic
information is available (Grosjean and Hirt, 1996).
A comparable study was done by Casillas and Frank (2013)
who also investigated which linguistic cues children use to anticipate a turn ending. In contrast to Keitel et al. (2013) they tested
1–7 year-olds and instead of using conversations done by actors,
they measured the children’s gaze shifts while watching videos of
conversations between puppets. Casillas and Frank (2013) found
that even 1 and 2-year-olds anticipated turn endings, and that
their anticipation correlated positively with the duration of the
gap between two successive turns. They also manipulated the
prosodic or lexical information (or both) of the conversations,
and compared question with non-question turns. In their general discussion, they write that “Question effects are strongest
when both prosodic and lexical cues are present, contrary to
prior findings with adult listeners that found lexical information
sufficient to predict upcoming turn-end boundaries (De Ruiter
et al., 2006)” (emphasis in original). We are not convinced that
there is a clear contradiction between their study and the result
of De Ruiter et al. (2006) for the following reasons. First, the
study by Casillas and Frank (2013) does not provide enough
information to assess whether there is a statistically significant
effect corresponding to this specific claim. Second, in the study
by De Ruiter et al. (2006), the factor Question vs. No-Question
was not investigated. (In Stivers et al. (2009) the data from De
Ruiter et al. (2006) was reanalyzed and indeed showed no difference between responses to questions and non-questions, but
that was only for the natural data.) Finally, it is possible, perhaps
even plausible, that asking actors to record a conversation speaking “as if they were on a children’s television show” (p. 2) will
result in prosodic patterns that are more exaggerated than in natural speech, due to the explicit child-directedness of the actors’
speech. For these reasons, we do not (yet) see a clear contradiction between the results of Casillas and Frank (2013) and those of
De Ruiter et al. (2006).
To investigate how listeners use lexico-syntactic information
to anticipate turn-ends Magyari and De Ruiter (2012) conducted
a gating study. They used the experimental stimuli of De Ruiter
et al.’s (2006) study and selected turns of which the ends were
either predicted with a high or with a low accuracy in the buttonpress experiment. The results showed that the proportion of the
correct guesses of upcoming words was higher when the accuracy
of button-press in the original experiment was higher. Furthermore, in the gating study the participants expected more words to
come with those turns that resulted in button presses that occurred
too late in De Ruiter et al.’s (2006) study. They concluded that listeners make predictions in advance about which, and therefore
how many, words will follow in a turn. These predictions help to
estimate the remaining duration of the turn.
The idea that lexico-syntactic information serves as source
for listeners’ anticipation performance is also supported by
conversation-analytic studies (e.g., Ford and Thompson, 1996;
Selting, 1996; Caspers, 2003). Caspers (2003) showed in her quantitative investigation that turn transitions are always located at
syntactic completion points. She concluded that syntax constitutes the main information source for end-of-turn projection.
Similar findings, based on a quantitative analysis of standard

www.frontiersin.org

Anticipation in turn-taking

German, have been presented in Selting (1996), who concluded that listeners primarily exploit syntactic structure to
project turn endings. Ford and Thompson (1996) found in
their analysis of an American English face-to-face corpus that
speaker change most frequently occurred when syntactic completion was combined with intonational as well as pragmatic
completion. They concluded that syntax operates together with
intonation and pragmatics to project the end of turns (see
also Gravano and Hirschberg, 2011). As not all these studies
found a perfect correspondence of syntactic completion points
to turn-transitions, it remains an intriguing question how the
distinction between those syntactic completions that are, and
those that aren’t treated as turn-ends by the listeners is made.
Unfortunately, this question cannot be satisfactorily answered
by studying correlations in dialog corpora, but would require
explicit experimentation to be able to distinguish correlation from
causation.
To summarize, there is evidence from multiple sources that listeners are able to anticipate the end of the speaker’s turn (De Ruiter
et al., 2006; Casillas and Frank, 2013; Keitel et al., 2013). But the
mere existence of an anticipation ability does not imply that it is
actually used to predict when a turn is finished in natural communication. Furthermore, Heldner and Edlund (2010) argued that
turn-taking could at least partially be explained by assuming that
conversationalists simply react to signals. Thus, the first question
we want to investigate in this study is: is turn-taking based on
anticipation or on reaction?

EXPERIMENT 1
To determine the relative role of anticipation and reaction in turntaking we conducted a button-press experiment using the same
experimental methodology as in De Ruiter et al. (2006). We took
turns from natural conversations and asked the participants to
indicate the end of the turn by pressing a button. In the turns, we
manipulated the information available for anticipation of the turn
end and studied the effect of this manipulation on the projection
accuracy. Our manipulations ranged from providing complete
advance information about the turn-end to completely removing
all linguistic information from the turn. (These manipulations
are described in detail below.) The logic is that if the projection
accuracy in responding to the original (unchanged) turns is comparable to responses to turns with advance information, then this
is evidence for anticipation. On the other hand, if the projection
performance to the natural turns is similar to the responses to the
turns without or with substantially reduced linguistic information, this is evidence for people reacting to the perceived end of
the turn.
MATERIALS AND METHODS

Compliance with ethics guidelines

The experimental methods used in this project have been approved
by the Ethics Board of Bielefeld University. Informed consent was
obtained from all subjects.
Participants

Eighty native speakers of German participated in Experiment 1
(56 females, 24 males).

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 64

Riest et al.

Stimulus collection

The stimulus collection procedure is the same as the one described
in De Ruiter et al. (2006). For maximum ecological validity we took
our stimuli from a natural German ‘telephone’ corpus (audio-only
conversation), which we recorded in our lab. We recorded 16 native
speakers of German in eight dyadic conversations (four female–
male, three female–female, one male–male). The participants in
each dyad were friends. For the stimulus collection we told the
participants to just talk about anything they liked and gave them
no further instruction. Each dyad’s conversation lasted 20 min,
resulting in a total of 160 min of recorded conversation.
For the audio recordings we put the participants in two separate
rooms and required them to wear closed headphones. Directional
microphones were placed on a table in front of them. We established a telephone-like connection between them, such that both
participants could hear both themselves and their interlocutor.
The speech of each of the two participants was recorded separately on the two channels of a stereo recording device. This way,
we avoided cross talk between the participants in our recordings.
The participants rapidly got used to the recording situation and
the resulting conversations appeared natural and lively.
After recording the corpus, the conversations were transcribed,
registering overlaps, pauses, laughter, turn beginnings and endings, assessments (Goodwin, 1986), and continuers (Schegloff,
1982). In addition we measured the Floor Transfer Offset (FTO) of
1597 turn transitions. The FTO value is defined “as the difference
(in seconds) between the time that turn starts and the moment the
previous turn ends” (De Ruiter et al., 2006, p. 516). Hence, a gap
between two turns is characterized by a positive FTO value and an
overlap by a negative one. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the
FTO values.
Although the general shape of the FTO distribution resulting
from the German telephone corpus looks similar to the Dutch
FTO distribution from De Ruiter et al. (2006), the distributions
differ in a number of aspects. There are small differences in the
means, variances, skewness, and kurtosis (see Table 1)1 .
1 In

order to be able to meaningfully compare the higher moments of the two
distributions, three outliers containing unrealistically large positive FTO values were
removed from the data from the experiment by De Ruiter et al. (2006) for this table.

Anticipation in turn-taking

Table 1 | Comparison of Dutch and German telephone corpora.

N

Dutch telephone

German telephone

FTO

FTO

1507

1597

Mean

[ms]

0

131

Median

[ms]

38

141

Mode

[ms]

173

162

Variance

[ms]

338

234

Minimum

[ms]

−3080

−2955

Maximum

[ms]

Skewness
Kurtosis

2839

2902

−0.348

0.136

6.923

3.124

From this corpus we randomly selected 100 target turns and an
additional 16 turns for practice purposes. We took care that the
turns contained at least five words so that the participants in the
planned button-press experiments obtained enough information
content to potentially base their reaction on. Furthermore, we
made sure that the random selection reflected the distribution of
pauses and overlaps of the natural conversations. Furthermore we
balanced the sex of the speaker in the target turns (50 % female,
50% male). The total number of different speakers in our target
stimuli was 16. Table 2 presents some descriptive statistics of the
target turns.
After selecting the target turns, we extracted them into individual sound files using Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2012) and
created four different versions of each stimulus. These versions
were as follows.
Natural-Turn. The target turn was presented as it occurred in the
natural conversations. In this condition the participants had access
to all potentially relevant information to base their anticipation or
reaction on.
Advance-Knowledge. The participants could first read the content
(a literal transcription) of the turn before they heard the target
stimulus. Because the participants knew in advance how the turn

FIGURE 1 | Floor Transfer Offset (FTO) distribution of the German telephone corpus.

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 65

Riest et al.

Anticipation in turn-taking

Table 2 | Descriptive statistics of target turns.
Minimum Maximum Mean Mode
Duration

[ms]

FTO

[ms] −1828

Number of Words

863

5

7105

3157

1257

96

−70

29

13

8

SD

3136 1415
417
6

was going to end, they were, in principle, maximally capable to
anticipate the turn end. In this condition the response distribution
of anticipated responses was measured.
Scrambled-Word-Order. We randomly changed the order of the
words within the target turn using Praat. The pauses between the
words in the original were assigned to the subsequent word. The
resulting stimuli therefore had the same duration as the NaturalTurn stimuli. In this condition there was no sequential wordorder information to base the anticipation on, but there were still
words present. Thus, the predictability of a word on the basis
of its preceding words is switched off, i.e., the cloze probability
(Taylor, 1953) of the words in the resulting turns was very low.
In contrast to the Natural-Turn condition the anticipation of the
turn end on the basis of sequential lexical information was made
impossible.
Noise. The Noise condition was created using a Praat script that
convolved the speech stimulus of the natural turn with white noise.
The resulting sample of constant noise had the same duration
and frequency spectrum as the original fragment. This condition
served as a comparative baseline from which all linguistic information that could be used for anticipation was removed. The only
way to be certain that the turn has ended in this condition is to
react to the turn end. This condition measured the response distributions when the participants had no choice but to react to the
end of the turn.
In order to control for subjective loudness between conditions
and stimuli we adjusted the loudness of all stimuli to a reference
sone value.
Design

Each participant was presented with four trial blocks (Natural
turn, Advance-Knowledge, Scrambled-Word-Order, Noise) each
containing 25 target turns. Within each block there were four
practice trials followed by the 25 target turns. We created eight
different experimental lists. In the first four lists we permutated
the block order according to a Latin-square design. The remaining four lists were the same as the first four lists with the block
order as well as the presentation order of the stimuli reversed.
Each of the target turns appeared in all four conditions across
the lists but none appeared twice within the same experimental
list.
Procedure

The participants received a written instruction that they had to
listen to short audio fragments, taken from real conversations, and
to press a button as soon as they thought the speaker in the fragments would finish speaking. They were informed that they would

www.frontiersin.org

be presented with four different blocks, and that in one of these
blocks they had to first read the content of the fragment before
they heard the corresponding audio fragment. Furthermore, they
were informed that in two blocks the stimuli were manipulated
acoustically. The stimuli were presented to them via closed headphones. We randomly assigned the participants to one of the eight
experimental lists (10 per list).
The participants were presented first with the four practice
trials and after that with the corresponding trial block. After
each practice block the participants got the chance to ask the
experimenter questions. Each experimental block contained a
visual countdown from 3 to 1 followed by the auditory presentation of the stimuli. As soon as the participants pressed the
button the sound was immediately cut off. In this way we made
sure that the participants got no feedback about their performance. The trial block Advance-Knowledge differed from the
other trial blocks because after the visual countdown the participants were presented with a written sentence, representing
the content of the turn. After pressing the button the sentence disappeared and the acoustic presentation of the stimulus
started.
For the presentation of the stimuli we used the E-Prime software package (Schneider et al., 2012a,b), which also allowed us to
record the time from stimulus onset to button press.
Results and discussion

We first calculated the BIAS, which is defined as response time
minus the duration of the target turn. Figure 2 shows the BIAS
distributions for the four different conditions. Figure 3 shows an
overview of the average BIAS per condition. The average BIAS is
negative in all conditions, which gives a first hint that participants
tried to anticipate the turn ending, rather than wait until the turn
fragment was over.
An ANOVA for the dependent variable BIAS showed
a significant effect for presentation condition (by subjects:
F1(3,315) = 23.259, p < 0.001; by items: F2(3,297) = 18.82,
p < 0.001). Bonferroni-corrected paired t-tests, pairing over identical turn fragments from the two conditions under comparison,
revealed that the Natural turn condition led to significantly more
negative BIAS than the Noise and the Scrambled-Word-Order
condition. The latter condition led to significantly more negative BIAS than the Noise condition. Whereas the BIAS in the
Advance-Knowledge and the Natural turn condition did not differ
significantly from each other.
Conventional significance tests are designed to reject the null
hypothesis without fault in the limit of infinite sample size. This is
characterized by vanishing p-values and unbounded t-values. In
contrast, if the null hypothesis is true and infinite sample sizes are
considered the p-values are not converging to any limit value. Correspondingly, under the null hypothesis, all p-values are all equally
likely (Rouder et al., 2009). Hence, it is not possible to claim evidence favoring a null hypothesis using conventional significance
tests. We therefore also performed a Bayesian analysis (Jeffreys,
1961; Kass and Raftery, 1995) for the Advance-Knowledge and
the Natural-Turn condition by comparing them using a Bayesian
paired t-test (Rouder et al., 2009). To be consistent with Morey
and Rouder (2011) and Rouder et al. (2012) we used a Cauchy

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 66

Riest et al.

Anticipation in turn-taking

FIGURE 2 | Response distributions per condition from Experiment 1.

Table 3 | Evidence Categories for Bayes Factor, adapted from Jeffreys
(1961), cited in Wetzels et al. (2011).
Bayes factor

Interpretation

>100

Decisive evidence for HA

30–100

Very strong evidence for HA

10–30

Strong evidence for HA

3–10

Substantial evidence for HA

1–3

Anecdotal evidence for HA

1

No evidence

1/3–1

Anecdotal evidence for H0

1/10–1/3

Substantial evidence for H0

1/30–1/10

Strong evidence for H0

1/100–1/30

Very strong evidence for H0

<1/100

Decisive evidence for H0

FIGURE 3 | Average BIAS of responses per condition as measured in
Experiment 1. Asterisk indicates statistical significance at the 0.05 level.

√
prior with scale parameter 2 for the standardized effect size in
combination with a Jeffreys prior on the variance. The analysis was
performed using the BayesFactor package (Morey et al., 2014) for
R (R Development Core Team, 2009). An overview of a common
textual interpretation of Bayes Factor values is presented in Table 3.

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

The Bayesian paired t-test using item means for the variable
BIAS revealed that the null hypothesis, stating that AdvanceKnowledge and Natural-Turn condition are equal in anticipation accuracy, is twelve times more likely than the alternative
hypothesis that these two conditions differ in button press accuracy (BF = 0.08). This provides “strong” evidence for the null
hypothesis.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 67

Riest et al.

Comparing the subject means of the BIAS variable with the
Bayesian paired t-test resulted in “substantial” evidence (BF = 0.1)
for the null hypothesis. This analysis allows us to conclude that
there is no statistically reliable difference between the BIAS in
the Advanced-Knowledge and the Natural Turn condition. So the
participants’ button press accuracy with the natural turns was just
as good as when they had advance information about the content
of the turn. This finding suggests that participants are indeed able
to anticipate a turn ending, and that they are using this strategy to
predict when a turn is going to end.
The significant difference between Scrambled-Word-Order and
Noise condition indicates that having access to words (even though
they were in the wrong order) still allowed them to anticipate better
than chance.
Although there was no significant difference in the button press
accuracy between the Advance-Knowledge and the Natural-Turn
condition, the participants could still have reacted to signals to
a certain extent. If the participants used both anticipation and
reaction as a strategy this should result in a lower response consistency. To investigate the response consistency over conditions we
computed the Entropy for every stimulus/condition pair (Shannon, 1948). The Shannon Entropy is a measure of uncertainty:
the more the responses are distributed over different intervals the
higher the Entropy. If the participants used only one strategy to
estimate when the turn is over, the Entropy should be lower. However, if the participants used both reaction and anticipation, their
responses should be more highly distributed, resulting in a higher
Entropy.
In Figure 4 the average Shannon Entropy (using a bin-width
of 250 ms; see De Ruiter et al., 2006 for details) is shown for every
condition. We can only show a by-item analysis as these Entropy
values can only be meaningfully computed for individual stimuli
over entire response distributions.
As in the BIAS analysis, an ANOVA of the Entropy showed
a main effect for condition F2(3,297) = 62.5, p < 0.001).

FIGURE 4 | Average Shannon Entropy per stimulus/condition as
measured in Experiment 1. Asterisk indicates statistical significance at
the 0.05 level.

www.frontiersin.org

Anticipation in turn-taking

Bonferroni-corrected paired t-tests revealed that all differences
between individual conditions were significant (p < 0.001), the
exception being the difference between Advance-Knowledge and
Natural-Turn.
Again we compared the Entropy values in the AdvanceKnowledge and Natural-Turn condition using a Bayesian paired
t-test. The analysis (BF = 0.2) provided “substantial” evidence for
the null hypothesis (no difference between Advance-Knowledge
and Natural-Turn in button press consistency).
The analysis of the participants’ button press consistency
supports the interpretation of the BIAS results. The results
showed that the Entropy in the Natural-Turn condition and
the Advance-Knowledge condition was comparable. Thus, in
the Natural-Turn condition the participants were able to consistently and accurately anticipate the turn-end and consequently used anticipation as a strategy to tell when a turn was
over.
In contrast, in the Scrambled-Word and the Noise condition the Entropy values were significantly higher than in the
other two conditions. This suggests that the participants tried
to anticipate the turn-end rather than just waited for the end
of the fragment, which lead to significantly broader distributed
responses. In addition, the average Entropy in the ScrambledWord order condition was significantly lower than in the Noise
condition. This corresponds to the BIAS analysis above where
participants in the Scrambled-Words condition were significantly more accurate in detecting the turn end. Hence, the
participants are more consistent and accurate in the end-ofturn projection when they have access to words compared to
when they only hear noise. One explanation of this finding
could be that even with the scrambled word order listeners
are able to recognize the basic meaning of the turn, enabling
them to roughly guess when the turn finishes. Additionally, it
is possible that once the participants “gambled” that a certain
word was the last word, they could anticipate the end of that
word, as suggested by research on auditory word recognitions
(Marslen-Wilson and Welsh, 1978; McClelland and Elman, 1986;
Marslen-Wilson, 1987).
We showed in Experiment 1 that listeners in dialog are indeed
able to anticipate the end of the speaker’s turn and that they consistently use this ability to predict when a turn is going to end. When
listening to the natural turns the participants showed the same
response accuracy and consistency as when they knew the end of
the turn in advance. Our results are in line with earlier findings that
listeners anticipate turn endings and that natural language is predictable to a certain degree (De Ruiter et al., 2006; Magyari and De
Ruiter, 2012; Casillas and Frank, 2013; Keitel et al., 2013; Magyari
et al., 2014). Hence, in the first experiment we were able to show
that anticipation is the primary mechanism underlying smooth
turn-taking, and that participants consistently use this strategy to
detect a turn ending. Thus, our results support the turn-taking
model proposed by Sacks et al. (1974). Nevertheless, reaction to
the turn end might well serve as some kind of a “backup” mechanism in the case when the anticipation of the turn ending is, for
whatever reason, not possible.
We now have an empirically derived distribution of anticipation times, from a task in which the participants were asked

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 68

Riest et al.

to anticipate turn-ends, and had the information to do so. To
find out about the distributional properties of the reaction process, which we assume also plays a role, we need to study the
reaction time distribution of participants that had no information to anticipate (as in the Noise condition of Experiment 1)
but in addition, were not instructed to anticipate, but rather to
respond to the end of the stimulus. To this end, we conducted
Experiment 2.

EXPERIMENT 2
Heldner and Edlund (2010) suggested that turn transitions with
a gap longer than 200 ms are potentially explainable by assuming that participants respond to signals at the end of the turn. As
we discussed in the introduction, this assumption does not capture the stochastic nature of the time course of the two processes
involved. Instead, we assume that distributions of natural floor
transfer are actually a stochastic mixture of an anticipation and a
reaction time distribution. We wanted to empirically estimate the
distribution of reacted responses in order to be able to estimate
the proportion of turn-transitions that we were reasonably sure
were reactions (and not to anticipations) to turn transitions.
An empirically estimated anticipation distribution is provided
by the Advanced-Knowledge condition of Experiment 1. In Experiment 2 we want to find the other distribution based on pure
reaction time. To this end, we used the Noise stimuli from Experiment 1, but now explicitly instructed the participants to respond
only after they perceived the end of the fragment.
MATERIALS AND METHODS

Participants

Twenty native speakers of German participated in the second
experiment (14 females, 6 males). None of the participants in
Experiment 2 had taken part in Experiment 1.
Stimuli and design

Each participant was presented with all of the 100 noise target
stimuli created in Experiment 1. In addition we took four stimuli from the practice block for practice purpose. There were two
experimental lists, whereas in the second list the presentation order
of the stimuli (including the practice trials) was reversed.
Procedure

The participants received a written instruction that they had to
listen to noise fragments and press a button as soon as the noise
stopped.
Within the experiment the participants were presented first
with the four practice trials followed by the 100 target stimuli.
After the practice trials the participants got the opportunity to
ask questions. After the presentation of the first 50 target stimuli
there was a break. The participants had to start the presentation of
the remaining 50 stimuli by pressing a button, so that they could
determine the length of the break by themselves. The participants
were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental lists (10
per list).
Results and discussion

The reaction time distribution obtained in this experiment
is presented together with the anticipation distribution from

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Anticipation in turn-taking

Experiment 1 in Figure 5. As expected, the reaction time distribution shows a pronounced sharp peak at a positive FTO (i.e.,
after the stimulus) whereas the anticipation distribution is broader
and extends into the negative FTO range. In addition, the mode
of the anticipation distribution is at a negative FTO value. The
intersection of the two distributions characterizing the response
time at which anticipation and reaction are equally probable is
in good agreement with the 200 ms cut-off value proposed by
Heldner and Edlund (2010). Nevertheless, the broad overlap of
the two distributions shows clearly that the use of a categorical
cut-off would not do justice to the stochastic nature of these two
processes.
This is why we define a new measure designed to capture
the relative probability of anticipation and reaction. The socalled Reaction Anticipation Proportion (RAP) value is defined
as the natural logarithm of the ratio of anticipation and reaction
probability.

RAP(t) = loge

PAnt (t)
PReac (t)


(1)

Equation 1: Definition of the RAP value as logarithmized ratio
of the anticipation PAnt (t) and reaction probabilities PReac (t) at
time t.
In Eq. (1) PAnt (t) and PReac (t) denote the probability that
a response at time t was an anticipation or reaction, respectively. These probabilities were computed in R (R Development
Core Team, 2009) using the density distributions (cosine kernel and 2.5 Sheather and Jones (1991) bandwidth) from the
Advanced-Knowledge condition of Experiment 1 and the Noise
condition of Experiment 2. To account for noise in the data
leading to possibly infinite RAP values we used a cutoff value of
10−4 in the factor calculations. Due to the log-scale of the RAP
ratio negative values corresponds to a higher probability of reaction whereas a positive value indicates that anticipation is more
likely.
The RAP as a function of FTO is presented in Figure 6. The
RAP is positive for a broad FTO interval ranging from about −750–
200 ms and negative for FTO values in the interval from about 200–
550 ms. Hence, reaction is more probable only in a relatively brief
time interval. In addition, the influence of the pronounced sharp
peak of the reaction distribution on the RAP value is weakened by
the non-vanishing anticipation probability in the corresponding
FTO range.
To demonstrate and validate the use of the RAP measure we
applied it to the data analysis of the Natural turn and Noise conditions of the first experiment. The mean RAP value of the Natural
turn condition was 0.60 and of the Noise condition −0.53. This
supports our interpretation of the results of Experiment 1 that in
the Natural turn condition the participants anticipated the end
of the turn. In contrast, the responses in the Noise condition
were predominantly based on reaction. It is noteworthy that the
absolute value of the mean RAP of the two conditions are comparable, indicating that anticipation and reaction are about equally
probable in the corresponding conditions.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 69

Riest et al.

Anticipation in turn-taking

FIGURE 5 | Anticipation and reaction intervals.

FIGURE 6 | Reaction Anticipation Proportion (RAP) value as a function of the FTO value.

We used the RAP measure to study the relative contribution of
semantic and syntactic information in end of turn anticipation in
Experiment 3.

EXPERIMENT 3
In Experiment 3 we investigated the relative role of syntax and
semantics as a cue for end-of-turn anticipation. Experimental
as well as corpus-based studies (Grosjean and Hirt, 1996; Selting, 1996; Caspers, 2003; De Ruiter et al., 2006; Magyari and
De Ruiter, 2012; Keitel et al., 2013; Magyari et al., 2014) suggest
that lexico-syntactic information serves as the main information
source for end-of-turn prediction. But in these studies semantic
and syntactic information is confounded, so the relative role of
the individual source of information in turn anticipation cannot
be established.
To tease apart semantic and syntactic information in natural communication we used the widely used distinction between
open and closed class words in linguistics and psycholinguistics.
Open class words in German contain nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs, and proper names. The open class words are “rich in referential meaning” (Chiarello and Nuding, 1987, p. 539) and “are
the main bearers of meaning in language, providing the building blocks for the overall sense that is contained in spoken and

www.frontiersin.org

written sentence” (Brown et al., 1999, p. 261). New words are
easily added to the item set and they constitute the main part
of our vocabulary (Segalowitz and Lane, 2000). The closed class
category in German contains prepositions, articles, conjunctions,
pronouns, modal verbs, quantifiers, and particles. Closed class
words are semantically empty and serve primary a syntactic role
(Crystal, 1988, p. 37). They serve to build the “structural skeleton of the sentence” (Kedar et al., 2006, p.325) and bear solely
grammatical information (Jakubowicz and Goldblum, 1995, p.
247). The closed class contains a specified set of items, in which
the addition of new objects trough cultural change is very slow
(Segalowitz and Lane, 2000). Although closed class words only
form a minority of our vocabulary, they are used much more
frequently than open class words (Baayen et al., 1995; Rochon
et al., 2000). To summarize, “the distinction between open- and
closed class words can be seen as a basic reflection of the separation between syntax and semantics” (Brown et al., 1999, p.
261)2 .
2 We are aware that open class words can contain syntactic cues, such as inflections
and agreement on verbs and case marking on nouns, and closed class words can also
contain referential information. Particularly in the Closed-Class-Words condition
information as inflections could have helped to better anticipate the end of the turn.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 70

Riest et al.

Therefore, in this experiment, we operationalized semantic
information as open class words, and syntactic information as
closed class words. To address the question which information
source listeners use for anticipation, we conducted a similar
reaction time experiment as in Experiment 1. We manipulated
the presence of semantic and syntactic information in the turn
fragments from Experiment 1 by acoustically manipulating the
recognizability of open- and closed class words. To evaluate the
influence of these manipulations on the anticipation and reaction
probability we used the RAP measure introduced before.
If only syntax is used for end-of-turn prediction, then the
absence of closed class words should result in a decrease in anticipated and an increase of reacted responses. On the other hand,
if semantic information is used for the anticipation of a turn
ending, we expect a deteriorated anticipation performance in
absence of open class words. However, if both semantic and syntactic information are used to the same extent, then the effect
should be similar in absence of content as well as closed class
words.
MATERIALS AND METHODS

Participants

Eighty native speakers of German who neither participated in
Experiment 1 nor in Experiment 2 participated in Experiment
3 (53 females, 27 males).
Stimuli

The same 100 target and 16 practice turns as in Experiment
1 were used. We created four different versions of each turn
fragment (see Table 4 for an example of one experimental
stimuli in all conditions). Natural Turn: the target turn was
presented as it occurred in the natural conversation. ClosedClass-Words-Removed: the closed class words were “removed”
by low-pass filtering (at 500 Hz Hanning Window). Open-ClassWords-Removed: by low-pass filtering we “removed” the open
class words (at 500 Hz Hanning Window). Intonation-Only: the
whole turn was low-pass filtered (at 500 Hz Hanning Window)
so that no words could be recognized, but intonation remained
intact. This condition served as a comparative baseline since neither syntactic nor semantic information were left in the turn
fragment.
In the conditions Open-Class-Words-Removed and ClosedClass-Words-Removed the number of filtered words were made
equal to the minimum number of open class words and closed
class words in the turn. In this way we made sure that the number
of filtered open and closed class words were the same for the
same source stimulus. The decision which words were low-pass filtered was randomized. In order to control for subjective loudness
between conditions and stimuli we again adjusted the loudness of
all stimuli to a reference sone value.

Anticipation in turn-taking

25 and the combined block Closed-Class-Words-Removed and
Open-Class-Words-Removed 50 target turns (25 stimuli from
Closed-Class-Words-Removed and 25 stimuli from Open-ClassWords-Removed). Within each block there were four practice trials
followed by 25 and 50 target turns, respectively. We created eight
experimental lists. As in Experiment 1, we permutated the block
order in four of these lists according to a Latin-square design.
The remaining four lists were the same as the first four lists with
the presentation order of the target stimuli and the practice trials
reversed. As in Experiment 1 the lists were constructed so that all
of the 100 target stimuli appeared in all four conditions across the
lists but none appeared twice within the same experimental list.
Procedure

We used the same procedure as in Experiment 1.
Results and discussion

Figure 7 shows the response distributions for the four different
conditions. Figure 8 shows the average RAP values for the different
conditions. The average positive RAP values in the Natural-Turn
and the Closed-Class-Words-Removed condition indicate that the
participants anticipated more frequently than reacted to the end of
the turn in these conditions. In the Open-Class-Words-Removed
and the Intonation-Only condition the participants reacted more
often to the end of the turn.
An ANOVA on the RAP values showed a significant effect for
presentation condition (by subjects: F1(3,315) = 47.85, p < 0.001,
by items: F2(3,297) = 74.11, p < 0.001). Bonferroni-corrected
paired t-tests revealed that all differences between individual
conditions were significant (p < 0.001).
The BIAS distributions of the critical conditions ClosedClass-Words-Removed and Open-Class-Words-Removed, shown
in Figure 9, supported the RAP analysis.
The results showed that when closed class words are removed
participants are still able to anticipate the turn ending, although
compared to the Natural turn condition the anticipation performance deteriorated. But when the participants could only
identify closed class words (and not open class words) they reacted
significantly more frequently to the turn end than when only open
class words were identifiably.

Table 4 | Example of one experimental turn in all four conditions
(underlined the respective low-pass filtered words).
Condition

Example

Natural-Turn

ich äh warte erstmal auf meine

Closed-Class-Words-Removed

ich äh warte erstmal auf

schwester und rufe die dann heute an

meine schwester und rufe die dann

Design

Each participant in the experiment was presented with three
trial blocks: (1) Natural-Turn, (2) Intonation-Only, (3) The
stimuli from the Closed-Class-Words-Removed and Open-ClassWords-Removed condition. The latter were presented within one
block. The blocks Natural-Turn and Intonation-Only contained

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

heute an
Open-Class-Words-Removed

ich äh warte erstmal auf meine
schwester und rufe die dann heute an

Intonation-Only

ich äh warte erstmal auf meine
schwester und rufe die dann heute an

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 71

Riest et al.

Anticipation in turn-taking

FIGURE 7 | Response distributions per condition from Experiment 3.

FIGURE 8 | Average RAP value per condition from Experiment 3.
Asterisks indicate statistical significance at the 0.001 level.

The results suggest that semantic information is more important than syntactic information for end-of-turn anticipation. If no
semantic information is available, it is less likely for the listeners to

www.frontiersin.org

anticipate the turn ending. This also means that only knowing the
syntactic frame and number of slots is not sufficient to estimate
the timing of the turn. Nevertheless, the anticipation performance
increased significantly when both open class words as well as closed
class words were available. This could be explained by the fact that
by removing closed class words the prediction of the content of
the turn is also hampered. So for maximal anticipation performance listeners need semantic as well as syntactic information,
probably because they need to be able to project the content of the
turn. These results support the findings of Magyari and De Ruiter
(2012) and Magyari et al. (2014) that listeners project the content
of the turn to be able to estimate its duration.
Another interesting finding is that participants’ anticipation
performance was significantly higher when they got only closed
class words compared to when only intonational and rhythmical information was available. This indicates that on top of the
prosodic properties the syntactic structure provides additional
anticipation cues.
Taken together these results suggest that semantic information
is the most essential cue for anticipation. But to be maximally
capable to anticipate a turn ending listeners need both semantic
and syntactic information, since only the combination of both
information sources allows for a correct projection of the content
of the turn.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 72

Riest et al.

Anticipation in turn-taking

FIGURE 9 | Density plot of the BIAS distribution (in ms) of the Open-Class-Words-Removed and the Closed-Class-Words-Removed conditions. A
paired t -test revealed that the difference of the means of the two conditions was significant [t (99) = −3.23, p < 0.01].

GENERAL DISCUSSION
In this study we addressed three different questions. First we
investigated whether the observed accuracy in natural turn-taking
was primarily due to anticipation or reaction to signals. Second,
we wanted to quantitatively estimate the relative contribution of
anticipation and reaction processes to the observed distribution of
floor transfer timings. Finally, we studied the relative contribution
of semantic and syntax in the timing of turn transitions.
In Experiment 1 we conducted a button press experiment in
which we manipulated the information necessary for anticipation. The results showed that the listeners’ response accuracy and
consistency are similar when they (a) heard the natural turn and
(b) when they are maximally able to anticipate the turn end by
having advance information about the turn content. We conclude
that listeners are indeed able to anticipate a turn ending and that
they use this strategy consistently to tell when a turn is going
to end. Thus, our findings support the functioning of the turntaking mechanism proposed by Sacks et al. (1974). But it appears
plausible that reaction to the turn ending could function as a
“backup” mechanism in case of failures to anticipate turn-endings
timely.
The data collected in Experiment 1 allowed us to estimate an
empirical distribution for pure anticipation, so we proceeded to
assess the counterpart distribution for pure reaction in Experiment 2 by explicitly instructing participants to react to the end of
noise signals. We combined the two distributions to estimate the
RAP, which represents the relative probability for a turn transition
to have been guided by anticipation or reaction. By instructing the participants to react to the offset of a noise signal we
estimated the ‘other extreme’ of anticipation, namely responding to the very end of a stimulus. We assume that a reaction
to the offset of noise and a reaction to possible signals occurring at the very end of the turns (such as intonational patterns
occurring immediately before the end of turns) are comparable
from a reaction time point of view. It should be pointed out
that it is also possible that conversationalists react to signals that
occur before the very end of the turn. Because in our approach
we assessed only the extreme opposites of pure (in the sense of
‘as pure as practically achievable’) anticipation and reaction, our

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

data do not allow for an estimation of the possible contribution
of such responses to the relative proportion of anticipation and
reaction.
In Experiment 3 we investigated the effect of the presence or
absence of semantic and syntactic information on the anticipation and reaction probability using the RAP measure. The results
showed that the participants were still able to anticipate the end
of the turn when they got access to semantic information. With
only syntactic information available, the participants started to
rely more on reaction. However, we found that to be maximally
able to anticipate, listeners need syntactic information as well
as semantic information. The absence of syntactic information
hampers the projection of the content of the turn. We concluded
that for anticipation both semantic and syntactic information are
needed. Nevertheless, it appears that semantic information is a
more important cue than syntactic information.
The RAP measure introduced in Experiment 2 is not only
an analysis tool for the characterization of turn transitions but
implies an inherently stochastic view of the turn taking process.
By empirically estimating, for the first time, separate probability
distributions for anticipation and reaction processes in end-ofturn detection, we were able to estimate the relative probability
for a turn transition to be caused by anticipation or reaction at a
given FTO value. This differs from the approach by Heldner and
Edlund (2010) who suggested that any FTO larger than 200 ms
could plausibly be explained by reaction, while FTOs shorter than
this threshold indicate anticipation. The latter approach does not
allow for the realistic possibility that anticipation could have been
late, or reaction could have been early. Our RAP measure provides this information and allows for a more realistic assessment
of the individual role of anticipation and reaction in turn taking.
In addition, our model makes it possible to address many open
questions in turn taking research, especially regarding the mechanism itself and its robustness. Finally, a very exciting (though
time-consuming) possibility is to derive RAP/FTO curves for different languages. The RAP could reflect differences in the timing
of how different languages deliver discourse-relevant information.
Here, morphosyntactic differences between languages, for instance
languages with relatively free word order relying heavily on case

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 73

Riest et al.

marking versus languages like English with relatively fixed word
order and a lean case marking system, may be reflected in different
RAP/FTO curves. Alternatively, very similar RAP/FTO curves may
suggest the presence of universals in the delivery of information
in natural dialog.
Despite the mentioned advantages of the RAP measure over
the strict threshold value suggested by Heldner and Edlund
(2010), the RAP measure also does not incorporate the possibility of an intentionally delayed turn, for instance when that
turn constitutes a ‘dispreferred response.’ Although this can
be shown to happen in natural conversations, it is a situation
that is difficult to recreate in a button press experiment; in
our experimental setting we instructed the participants either
to press the button when they thought the turn finished, or
when the sound fragment was over. In this situation, we could
not give the participants an interactional reason to delay their
responses.
We showed in Experiment 3 that semantic information is a
more important cue for anticipation than syntax. This finding contradicts former studies (Sacks et al., 1974; Selting, 1996; Caspers,
2003; De Ruiter et al., 2006) which assume that listeners rely primarily on syntactic information for anticipation. But how could
semantic information serve to enable listeners to anticipate the
turn ending? One possibility is that listeners use semantic information to predict the content of the speaker’s turn and thus are
able to estimate which words will be produced to convey the content. This is in line with the findings of Magyari and De Ruiter
(2012) and Magyari et al. (2014) that listeners are able to predict the upcoming words of a turn. Another possibility is that
during their experience as conversationalists, listeners have over
the years built up certain expectations about how much (new)
semantic information, on average, a conversational turn tends
to contain. If the amount of semantic information exceeds this
expected amount, this could be exploited as a cue that the turn is
about to end soon.
Another explanation for the importance of semantic information in turn-taking could be that in naturalistic contexts, the
semantics may provide stricter constraints on the turn construction than syntax does. Syntax theoretically allows for an infinite
extension of a turn by the addition of new constituents. Furthermore, non-sense sentences like the famous “Colorless beautiful
green ideas sleep furiously” (Chomsky, 1957, p. 15) are syntactically correct but provide no reliable meaning to base anticipation
on. In other words, the end of a “Jabberwocky” sentence is
impossible to predict.
By presenting isolated turns from natural conversations and
letting the participants respond to the end of the turn by a button
press we could both keep the characteristics of natural speech and
at the same time systematically manipulate the turn fragments in
order to test our specific hypotheses. Nevertheless, by isolating the
turns we are not able to consider the impact of dialog context on
anticipation. The discourse context could add information about
the speaker’s illocutionary intentions in the turn that is being produced, which in turn could help the listener anticipate its content.
It is an interesting issue for future research whether, and if so,
how, the discourse context can improve the anticipation of a turn
ending.

www.frontiersin.org

Anticipation in turn-taking

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
The authors contributed to the following activities. Carina Riest
and Jan P. de Ruiter designed the studies. Carina Riest and
Annett B. Jorschick collected the data. Carina Riest, Annett B.
Jorschick, and Jan P. de Ruiter analyzed the data. The paper was
drafted by Carina Riest and revised by Annett B. Jorschick and
Jan P. de Ruiter. All authors approved the final version of the
manuscript and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the
work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was part of project B5 of the SFB 673 “Alignment
in Communication” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
REFERENCES
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., and Bulickers, L. (1995). The CELEX Lexical
Database (CD-ROM). Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of
Pennsylvania.
Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2012). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer. [Computer Software Manual]. Available at: http://www.praat.org ([Computer program]
Version 5.3.14)
Brown, C. M., Hagoort, P., and Ter Keurs, M. (1999). Electrophysiological signatures
of visual lexical processing: open-and closed-class words. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 11,
261–281. doi: 10.1162/089892999563382
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2013). “The development of predictive processes in
children’s discourse understanding,“ in Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting
of the Cognitive Science Society, eds M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, and I.
Wachsmuth (Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society), 299–304.
Caspers, J. (2003). Local speech melody as a limiting factor in the turntaking system in Dutch. J. Phon. 31, 251–276. doi: 10.1016/S0095-4470(03)
00007-X
Chiarello, C., and Nuding, S. (1987). Visual field effects for processing content and function words. Neuropsychologia 25, 539–548. doi: 10.1016/00283932(87)90078-9
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Crystal, D. (1988). “Linguistic levels in Aphasia,” in Aphasia, eds F. C. Rose, R. Whurr,
and M. A. Wyke (London: Whurr), 23–45.
De Ruiter, J.-P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s Turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language (Baltim.) 82,
515–535. doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
Duncan, S. J. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in
conversation. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 23, 283–292. doi: 10.1037/h0033031
Duncan, S. J. (1973). Toward a grammar for dyadic conversation. Semiotica 9, 29–46.
doi: 10.1515/semi.1973.9.1.29
Duncan, S. J., and Fiske, D. W. (1977). Face-to-Face Interaction: Research, Methods,
and Theory. New York: Erlbaum.
Duncan, S. J., and Niederehe, G. (1974). On signalling that it’s your turn to speak.
J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 10, 234–247. doi: 10.1016/0022-1031(74)90070-5
Ford, C. E., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). “Interactional units in conversation:
syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns,”
in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S. A. Thompson
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press), 134–184.
Goodwin, C. (1986). Between and within: alternative sequential treatments of
continuers and assessments. Hum. Stud. 9, 205–217. doi: 10.1007/BF00148127
Gravano, A., and Hirschberg, J. (2011). Turn-taking cues in task-oriented dialogue.
Comput. Speech Lang. 25, 601–634. doi: 10.1016/j.csl.2010.10.003
Grosjean, F., and Hirt, C. (1996). Using prosody to predict the end of sentences in
English and French: normal and brain-damaged subjects. Lang. Cogn. Process. 11,
107–134. doi: 10.1080/016909696387231
Heldner, M., and Edlund, J. (2010). Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations.
J. Phon. 38, 555–568. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2010.08.002
Indefrey, P., and Levelt, W. J. M. (2004). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components. Cognition 92, 101–44. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2002.06.001

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 74

Riest et al.

Jakubowicz, C., and Goldblum, M. C. (1995). Processing of number and gender inflections by French-speaking aphasics. Brain Lang. 51, 242–68. doi:
10.1006/brln.1995.1060
Jeffreys, H. (1961). Theory of probability. 3rd Edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
Clarendon Press.
Jescheniak, J. D., Schriefers, H., and Hantsch, A. (2003). Utterance format effects
phonological priming in the picture-word task: implications for models of phonological encoding in speech production. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 29,
441–454. doi: 10.1037/0096-1523.29.2.441
Kass, R. E., and Raftery, A. E. (1995). Bayes Factors. J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 90, 773–795.
doi: 10.1080/01621459.1995.10476572
Kedar, Y., Casasola, M., and Lust, B. (2006). Getting there faster: 18- and 24-monthold infants’ use of function words to determine reference. Child Dev. 77, 325–38.
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00873.x
Keitel, A., Prinz, W., Friederici, A. D., von Hofsten, C., and Daum, M. M. (2013).
Perception of conversations: the importance of semantics and intonation in children’s development. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 116, 264–277. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2013.
06.005
Kendrick, K. H., and Torreira, F. (2014). The timing and construction of preference: a quantitative study. Discourse Process. doi: 10.1080/0163853X.2014.
955997
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Magyari, L., Bastiaansen, M. C. M., de Ruiter, J. P., and Levinson, S. C. (2014). Early
anticipation lies behind the speed of response in conversation. J. Cogn. Neurosci.
26, 2530–2539. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00673
Magyari, L., and De Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.
00376
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word-recognition.
Cognition 25, 71–102. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(87)90005-9
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., and Welsh, A. (1978). Processing interactions and lexical
access during word recognition in continuous speech. Cogn. Psychol. 10, 29–63.
doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(78)90018-X
McClelland, J. L., and Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception.
Cogn. Psychol. 18, 1–86. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(86)90015-0
Morey, R. D., and Rouder, J. N. (2011). Bayes factor approaches for testing interval
null hypotheses. Psychol. Methods 16, 406–419. doi: 10.1037/a0024377
Morey, R. D., Rouder, J. N., and Jamil, T. (2014). BayesFactor Package: Computation
of Bayes Factors for Common Designs. Available at: http://bayesfactorpcl.r-forge.rproject.org/.
O’Connell, D. C., Kowal, S., and Kaltenbacher, E. (1990). Turn-taking: a critical analysis of the research tradition. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 19, 345–373. doi:
10.1007/BF01068884
Power, R. J. D., and Dal Martello, M. F. (1986). Some criticisms of Sacks, Schegloff,
and Jefferson on turn taking. Semiotica 58, 29–40. doi: 10.1515/semi.1986.58.
1-2.29
R Development Core Team. (2009). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical
Computing. Available at: http://www.r-project.org
Rochon, E., Saffran, E. M., Berndt, R. S., and Schwartz, M. F. (2000). Quantitative
analysis of aphasic sentence production: further development and new data. Brain
Lang. 72, 193–218. doi: 10.1006/brln.1999.2285
Rouder, J. N., Morey, R. D., Speckman, P. L., and Province, J. M. (2012).
Default Bayes factors for ANOVA designs. J. Math. Psychol. 56, 356–374. doi:
10.1016/j.jmp.2012.08.001

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Anticipation in turn-taking

Rouder, J. N., Speckman, P. L., Sun, D., Morey, R. D., and Iverson, G. (2009).
Bayesian t tests for accepting and rejecting the null hypothesis. Psychon. Bull. Rev.
16, 225–237. doi: 10.3758/PBR.16.2.225
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language (Baltim.) 50, 696. doi:
10.2307/412243
Schegloff, E. A. (1982). “Discourse as an interactional achievment: some uses of ‘uh
huh’ and other things that come between sentences,” in Roundtable on Languages
and Linguistics: Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk, ed. D. Tannen (Washington:
Georgetown University Press), 71–93.
Schneider, W., Eschman, A., and Zuccolotto, A. (2012a). E-Prime Reference Guide.
Pittsburgh: Psychology Software Tools, Inc.
Schneider, W., Eschman, A., and Zuccolotto, A. (2012b). E-Prime Users’s Guide.
Pittsburgh: Psychology Software Tools, Inc.
Schnur, T. T., Costa, A., and Caramazza, A. (2006). Planning at the phonological level during sentence production. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 35, 189–213. doi:
10.1007/s10936-005-9011-6
Segalowitz, S. J., and Lane, K. C. (2000). Lexical access of function versus content
words. Brain Lang. 75, 376–389. doi: 10.1006/brln.2000.2361
Selting, M. (1996). On the interplay of syntax and prosody in the constitution of
turn-constructional units and turns in conversation. Pragmatics 6, 357–387.
Shannon, C. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell Syst. Tech. J.
27, 379–423. doi: 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x
Sheather, S., and Jones, M. (1991). A reliable data-based bandwidth selection method
for kernel density estimation. J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B 53, 683–690.
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Taylor, W. (1953). “ Cloze procedure”: a new tool for measuring readability. Journal.
Q. 30, 415–433.
Wetzels, R., Matzke, D., Lee, M. D., Rouder, J. N., Iverson, G. J., and Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2011). Statistical evidence in experimental psychology: an
empirical comparison using 855 t tests. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 6, 291–298. doi:
10.1177/1745691611406923
Yngve, V. H. (1970). “On getting a word in edgewise,” in Proceedings of the Sixth
Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago 6, 567–578.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted
in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed
as a potential conflict of interest.
Received: 28 October 2014; accepted: 16 January 2015; published online: 02 February
2015.
Citation: Riest C, Jorschick AB and de Ruiter JP (2015) Anticipation in turn-taking:
mechanisms and information sources. Front. Psychol. 6:89. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.
00089
This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in
Psychology.
Copyright © 2015 Riest, Jorschick and de Ruiter. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The
use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited,
in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is
permitted which does not comply with these terms.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 89 | 75

ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
published: 09 February 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00098

Unaddressed participants’ gaze in multi-person interaction:
optimizing recipiency
Judith Holler* and Kobin H. Kendrick
Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Edited by:
Sonja A. E. Kotz, Max Planck Institute
Leipzig, Germany
Reviewed by:
Leonhard Schilbach, University
Hospital Cologne, Germany
Anne Keitel, University of Glasgow,
UK
*Correspondence:
Judith Holler, Language and Cognition
Department, Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1,
Nijmegen 6525XD, Netherlands
e-mail: judith.holler@mpi.nl

One of the most intriguing aspects of human communication is its turn-taking system. It
requires the ability to process on-going turns at talk while planning the next, and to launch
this next turn without considerable overlap or delay. Recent research has investigated the
eye movements of observers of dialogs to gain insight into how we process turns at talk.
More specifically, this research has focused on the extent to which we are able to anticipate
the end of current and the beginning of next turns. At the same time, there has been
a call for shifting experimental paradigms exploring social-cognitive processes away from
passive observation toward on-line processing. Here, we present research that responds to
this call by situating state-of-the-art technology for tracking interlocutors’ eye movements
within spontaneous, face-to-face conversation. Each conversation involved three native
speakers of English. The analysis focused on question–response sequences involving just
two of those participants, thus rendering the third momentarily unaddressed. Temporal
analyses of the unaddressed participants’ gaze shifts from current to next speaker revealed
that unaddressed participants are able to anticipate next turns, and moreover, that they
often shift their gaze toward the next speaker before the current turn ends. However, an
analysis of the complex structure of turns at talk revealed that the planning of these gaze
shifts virtually coincides with the points at which the turns first become recognizable as
possibly complete. We argue that the timing of these eye movements is governed by an
organizational principle whereby unaddressed participants shift their gaze at a point that
appears interactionally most optimal: It provides unaddressed participants with access to
much of the visual, bodily behavior that accompanies both the current speaker’s and the
next speaker’s turn, and it allows them to display recipiency with regard to both speakers’
turns.
Keywords: turn-taking, turn projection, eye gaze, eye-tracking, unaddressed participants

INTRODUCTION
The contrast formed by the white sclera surrounding a darker iris
and pupil is unique to the human eye (Kobayashi and Kohshima,
2001). This contrast renders eye gaze a highly salient cue in interaction with others, and the pivotal role gaze plays in human
communication has been demonstrated by numerous studies
(see Argyle and Cook, 1976; Cook, 1977; Kleinke, 1986; Itier
and Batty, 2009; Senju and Johnson, 2009; Rossano, 2012 for
reviews). By now, we know a great deal about how gaze functions in dyadic encounters, such as to initiate interaction, signal
address, receive addressee feedback, and coordinate turn transitions (e.g., Kendon, 1967, 1990; Argyle et al., 1973; Cary, 1978;
Duncan et al., 1979; Goodwin, 1980; Bavelas et al., 2002; Lerner,
2003; Rossano et al., 2009). Here, we study gaze behavior with
respect to another core aspect of social interaction, namely the
precise timing of gaze and turns at talk in multi-person interaction. More precisely, we investigate how the cognitive processing
of turns infuences gaze behavior of momentarily unaddressed
participants during question–response sequences and consider
the social opportunities this may create in a triadic conversation
context.

www.frontiersin.org

THE TIMING OF TURNS AT TALK

In social interaction, a system of turn-taking organizes opportunities to speak. According to Sacks et al. (1974), turns at talk are
constructed out of linguistic units that have recognizable structures, enabling a next speaker to project the structure in advance
and, consequently, anticipate the possible completion of the unit.
Subsequent research has examined the syntactic and prosodic
structures that allow for the projection of a current turn and
signal its possible completion (Ford and Thompson, 1996; Ford
et al., 1996; Selting, 1996; Wells and Macfarlane, 1998; Auer, 2005;
Local and Walker, 2012). Within the model, the first possible
completion of such a unit constitutes a place, referred to as a
transition-relevance place, at which a transition from current to
next speaker may occur (Sacks et al., 1974; Selting, 2000). A set
of rules and constraints in the model, such as a constraint on
more than one speaker at a time (Sacks et al., 1974; Jefferson,
1986; Schegloff, 2000), accounts for the observation that transitions tend to occur with minimal overlap between turns. At the
same time, rules, and constraints in the model lead to minimal gaps
between turns. This is particularly remarkable since quantitative
studies have shown that gaps between turns are most frequently

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 76

Holler and Kendrick

on the order of just 0–200 ms (Stivers et al., 2009; Heldner and
Edlund, 2010). As Levinson (2013) has argued, short gaps between
turns do not provide adequate time to prepare even a simple next
turn, which psycholinguistic research has shown requires at least
600 ms (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004; Indefrey, 2011). This suggests
that a next speaker must begin to plan the next turn well before
the current one is complete, a psycholinguistic challenge in which
projection of a current turn appears to play an important role (De
Ruiter et al., 2006; Magyari and de Ruiter, 2012; Magyari et al.,
2014).
THIRD-PERSON PERSPECTIVE EYE-TRACKING STUDIES ON
TURN-TAKING

Recently, a new experimental paradigm has been developed for
the study of the cognitive processes that underpin turn-taking
from a third-person perspective. The general procedure involves
participants being presented with a pre-recorded dialog or conversation between two people on a computer screen while their eye
movements are tracked and timed with respect to the turns at talk
they hear. Experimental studies using this novel paradigm have
shed light on the precise timing of eye movements and turns at
talk by measuring where observers of dialogs look and when they
do so.
A study by Augusti et al. (2010) has shown that infants of just
6 months of age shift their gaze from current speaker to next
speaker in accordance with the alternation of turns, thus, they
argue, showing a sensitivity to the natural flow of conversation.
Other studies have shown that, at least by 3 years of age, children
are not only able to track who is speaking at any one time, but
they are indeed able to anticipate upcoming turns, shifting their
gaze to the next speaker often before he or she begins to speak (von
Hofsten et al., 2009; Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013; Keitel et al.,
2013).
Studies using the same paradigm with adults have shown
that they, too, tend to look reliably at the current speaker (Tice
and Henetz, 2011; Casillas and Frank, 2012; Edlund et al., 2012;
Hirvenkari et al., 2013). However, these studies have yielded discrepant findings regarding when observers begin to look to the
next speaker. Foulsham et al. (2010) asked observers to watch a
video of others performing a conversation-based group-decision
task and to decide whom of these they would like to work with
on a subsequent task. Their findings showed that observers fixated the next speaker on average 150 ms before they started to
speak. Tice and Henetz (2011), Casillas and Frank (2012), and
Keitel et al. (2013) measured the eye movements of observers of
dialogs. Keitel et al. (2013) found that 54% of adults’ gaze shifts
occurred within a time window starting 500 ms prior to the end of
the current turn and ending with the beginning of the next turn.
The gaze shifts thus occurred while the current speaker was still
talking, or during the gap between turns, providing clear evidence
of anticipation of the next turn. Similarly, Tice and Henetz (2011)
and Casillas and Frank (2012) found that the majority of their
participants’ eye movements to the next speaker occurred either
during the gap between turns or within the first 200 ms of the next
turn. Since it takes around 200 ms for a saccadic eye movement to
be planned and launched (Salthouse and Ellis, 1980; Fischer and
Ramsperger, 1984; Becker, 1991; Allopenna et al., 1998; Griffin

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

and Bock, 2000), these gaze shifts must have been planned prior to
the beginning of this next turn. Moreover, in at least some cases,
observers shifted their gaze to the next speaker even before the
current turn had ended (Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013). Together,
the findings from these studies suggest that observers of scripted
dialogs and spontaneous group conversations engage in predictive
cognitive processes that allow them to anticipate the beginnings
of next turns, and, at least to some extent, also the ends of current
turns.
However, two studies using truly spontaneous (rather than
scripted or performed) dialogs have not found evidence for anticipatory looks to the next speaker. Edlund et al. (2012), too, have
shown that observers track current speakers with their gaze, and
although the precise timing of this gaze with respect to turn transitions is not provided, the data they do provide seem to suggest
that looks to the next speaker before he or she started to speak
were rare, if present at all. Hirvenkari et al. (2013), too, found that
their observers looked at the next speaker only after he or she had
already begun to speak. One possible reason for this, they state,
could be that participants in other studies (e.g., Foulsham et al.,
2010) may have been more eager to see the reactions of the participants due to the decision task they were asked to complete. They
argue that the gaze behavior of their participants merely observing
dialogs may have been “less tightly linked to the turn-taking than if
the task would have been more engaging, or if the subjects would
have actually taken part in the conversation” (Hirvenkari et al.,
2013, p. 6). Thus, it is evident that the nature of the experimental task and the spontaneity of the conversational exchange may
influence the temporal coupling of observers’ eye movements and
turns at talk. An investigation of the timing of eye movements and
speaking turns while participants are engaged in actual conversation, processing spontaneous turns without them being required
to complete an experimental task, is therefore an important next
step.
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

While there is some discrepancy in findings, studies using the
novel third-person perspective eye-tracking paradigm described
above have provided us with valuable first insights into how adults
may process turns at talk and transitions between them, as well as
how children acquire this skill during development. However, two
issues emerge from this work.
The first issue has already been alluded to in the preceding section and concerns the third-person perspective as such.
Recently, Schilbach (2010, 2014) and Schilbach et al. (2013) put
forward a convincing argument for the urgency of a shift in experimental paradigm, stating that “recent conceptual and empirical
developments consistently indicate the need for investigations that
allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social
cognition is fundamentally different when we are in interaction
with others rather than merely observing them” (Schilbach et al.,
2013, p. 393). Their argument, and the evidence they cite, concerns
the abundance of paradigms in the field of cognitive neuroscience
involving passive observation and the different insights interactive paradigms have provided in this domain. The latter immerse
participants in ‘online’ social interaction rather than ask them

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 77

Holler and Kendrick

to observe offline interactions, thus creating reciprocal relations
with sequences of actions and reactions shaping the communication between the participants (Wilms et al., 2010; Pfeiffer et al.,
2013).
One important question that remains, therefore, is when
participants shift their gaze from current to next speaker if
they themselves are ratified participants in the conversation but
momentarily unaddressed (Goffman, 1979, 1981; Clark and Carlson, 1982). If the degree of engagement that participants feel
indeed influences their ability (or motivation) to project either
current or next turns, then we might see more evidence of early
gaze shifts when participants are directly immersed in a live conversation. An alternative possibility is, however, that the considerably
reduced social context of third-person perspective paradigms
underestimates the cognitive demands placed on processing turns
at talk in spontaneous conversation. Participants may thus have
less cognitive resources available for projection in live conversation, meaning gaze shifts may be primarily responsive to the next
speaker beginning to speak rather than anticipatory. However, it
could also be that eye movements in face-to-face interaction do
not reflect the projection of current or next turns at all, but that
the social norms and dynamics of conversation determine where
participants look and when. Thus, while third-person perspective
eye-tracking paradigms allow for a high degree of experimental
control and manipulation to investigate eye movements during
turn-taking, and the role semantics and prosody play in this
context (Casillas and Frank, 2013; Keitel et al., 2013), they cannot necessarily tell us what guides participants’ eye movements
in more situated contexts such as spontaneous, multi-person
interaction.
The second issue concerns the structure and analysis of turns at
talk that have been used in third-person perspective eye-tracking
studies. With the exception of some studies (Foulsham et al.,
2010; Edlund et al., 2012; Hirvenkari et al., 2013), the stimuli in
third-person perspective eye-tracking studies were scripted and
strongly controlled, which has a range of implications. For one
thing, it means that the dialogs were presumably fairly carefully spoken and had rather long gaps between turns and few
if any overlaps. Indeed, in some cases the gaps between turns
were 900 ms on average (Keitel et al., 2013), which considerably
exceeds the ∼200 ms mean gap duration (Stivers et al., 2009) and
the 0–200 ms mode of gap durations (Stivers et al., 2009; Heldner and Edlund, 2010) observed for spontaneous conversation.
In fact, 900 ms gap durations are more representative of lengthened gaps marking dispreferred responses (Kendrick and Torreira,
2014). Careful pronunciation, lack of overlap, and relatively long
gaps may, of course, all influence how turns are processed and
projected.
Moreover, the structure of questions in spontaneous conversation is often complex, with more than one point of possible
completion within a single turn. Conversation-analytic research
on turn-taking has suggested that participants in conversation
monitor turns for points at which they are recognizable as possibly complete because such points constitute opportunities for
transition between speakers (Sacks et al., 1974). In the following
example, the participant addressed by the question responds at the
first point at which the question is possibly complete, even though

www.frontiersin.org

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

the speaker of the question continues his or her turn, adding a
term of address.
FD:IV:191 (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 702)
Desk: What is your last name [Loraine.
Caller:
[Dinnis.
Desk: What?
Caller: Dinnis.
Thus, the first possible completion of a question is not necessarily the end of the turn, as a speaker can continue to speak
past this point. If participants in conversation do indeed monitor turns at talk for points of possible completion, as Sacks
et al. (1974) proposed, then we may find evidence for this in the
eye movements of unaddressed participants in question–response
sequences. However, in studies using the third-person perspective paradigm, either the turns used as stimuli were constructed
to have simple structures in which the first possible completion
of the turn was coterminous with its end, or multiple possible
completions were not taken into account in the analysis. As a
consequence, it is currently unknown how the gaze behavior of
observers is timed with respect to points of possible completion
prior to the ends of turns as such. The literature on third-person
perspective eye-tracking paradigms has referred to eye movements
that precede the end of a turn as anticipatory. Since first possible completions are often not the end of the turn, gaze shifts
that are anticipatory with respect to the end of the turn may
actually follow a first possible completion point, or may virtually coincide with this point. The extent to which eye-movements
do or do not anticipate the possible completion of a turn matters for the interpretation of results from this paradigm within
models of turn-taking behavior, thus further underlining the
need for a systematic consideration of the intricate structure of
turns.
THE PRESENT STUDY: INVESTIGATING EYE MOVEMENTS AND TURNS
AT TALK IN SITU

The present study aims to shed light on the timing of eye movements and turns at talk by situating the third-person perspective
eye-tracking paradigm within spontaneous, live conversations. To
this end, using state-of-the-art technology, we studied a corpus
of triadic conversations between friends and examined exchanges
in which a speaker addressed a single participant, thus rendering the third a momentarily ‘unaddressed participant’ (Bolden,
2013; cf. ‘unaddressed recipient,’ Goffman, 1979, 1981; cf. ‘sideparticipant,’ Clark and Carlson, 1982; ‘audience,’ Levinson, 1988).
More specifically, we tracked this person’s eye movements during question–response sequences to measure whether, and if so
at precisely which point, unaddressed participants moved their
eyes from current to next speaker. This approach builds on earlier
work by moving from scripted dialogs involving actors to natural
multi-person interaction in which participants experience personal immediacy and co-presence, the turns at talk are of direct
relevance to them, and participants may become the addressee
at any given moment. Moreover, the measurements of turns and
gaps between them are not determined by the experimenter or
actors but are natural in content and length. Further, we not only

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 78

Holler and Kendrick

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

consider questions in their entirety but also apply a more finegrained analysis, tackling the intricate structure of spontaneous
questions by examining the timing of eye movements with respect
to first possible completions, as well as the end of turns. Thus, we
aim to answer not only the question of how eye movements are
timed with respect to turns, but also to what extent they are governed by the projection of the current or next turn. Finally, while
to date all reports have discussed observers’ gaze behavior across
turn transitions in terms of the cognitive processes that underpin
turn-taking, the present study also aims to consider the nature of
this phenomenon as a social behavior. This will help us understand whether we are dealing with a turn-taking phenomenon per
se or with one that belongs to some other order of conversational
organization.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
PARTICIPANTS AND CORPUS

The corpus consists of ten groups of participants engaging in
casual conversations in English recorded at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The
recordings include both ten triadic (three participants) and ten
dyadic (two of the three participants) conversations1 (for an eyetracking corpus of dyadic interactions in Flemish, see Brône and
Oben, 2014). All conversations are ∼20 min. in length. For the
eye-tracking analyses reported here, seven of the ten triadic conversations were analyzed as calibration was poor for the remaining
three. All participants were native speakers of English recruited
from the general Nijmegen population and knew each other prior
to the recording session (except for one triad in which one person
knew both of the other two participants who had not themselves met before). Their ages ranged from 19–68 years (Mean
age = 30 year). Two of the conversations were all female, two all
male, and three conversations consisted of two female and one
male participant.
LABORATORY SET-UP AND TECHNICAL EQUIPMENT

The recordings took place in a sound proof room equipped with
professional lighting suitable for high quality audio and video
recording. Participants sat in standard height chairs with armrests, arranged in a triangle with the chairs equidistantly placed
from one another. A ceiling microphone recorded the entire conversation. Each participant wore a head-mounted lightweight
uni-directional microphone (Shure SM10A), which recorded only
the respective participant’s voice, and a pair of eye-tracking glasses
(SMI, sampling rate 30 Hz). In addition, three HD video cameras
(Canon Legria HFG10, 25 fps) recorded frontal views of each person (except for one triad where one of the three HD cameras failed
to record; the respective participant’s data was not included in the
present analysis). Due to the spatial arrangement of the chairs with
respect to the cameras, each person was also visible from the right
and left side in the recordings made by the respective other two
video cameras. Figure 1 provides an overview of the laboratory
set-up and equipment.
1 Due to the present focus being on unaddressed participants’ eye movements, the
dyads are reported here for completeness sake but are not analyzed in the present
study.

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

FIGURE 1 | Illustration of the technical laboratory set-up used in the
present study.

For each session, the recorded material resulted in three individual videos from the cameras, three individual videos from
the eye-trackers (exported from the SMI recording device with
the gaze cursor overlaid onto the visual scene recorded by the
video cameras of the eye-trackers), three individual audio files,
and the audio file from the ceiling microphone. The audio
tracks were recorded in sync using a four-channel audio recorder
(Edirol/Roland R-44). The six video recordings and three individual audio recordings were combined and synchronized in Adobe
Premier Pro CS4 and then exported as a single audio–video file
for analysis (MP4) at 24 frames per second (see Figure 2). This
resulted in a time resolution of approximately 41 ms, the duration
of a single frame. The synchronization was based on audible and
visible information from a clapperboard used at the beginning and
end of each session.
PROCEDURE

Upon their arrival, participants were greeted by two investigators
who conducted the study (JH and KK) and were handed studypacks, including information about the study and procedure of the
session, forms asking about their language background, screening questionnaires ruling out motor and speech impairments, as
well as consent forms and questionnaires about handedness and
a variety of social dimensions. Once the study-packs had been
completed by all participants (except for the social questionnaires,
see below) and any queries had been answered, participants were
seated in their chairs in the recording room. All equipment was
prepared beforehand, allowing immediate fitting of the microphones and the eye-trackers (involving a three-point calibration
procedure).
Each recording session lasted approximately 40 min. in total,
with the first 20 min. constituting a trialogue phase and the

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 79

Holler and Kendrick

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

FIGURE 2 | Still frame from a synchronized six-video recording (one triad). Top panel shows the three eye-tracker videos including gaze cursor (in orange);
bottom panel shows the three HD camera recordings. The video of each participant’s view through the eye-tracker is positioned above the corresponding frontal
HD video recording of this participant.

second 20 min. a dialog phase. Upon completion of the initial
fitting procedure, the two investigators left the room and waited
in an adjacent area until the first 20 min. had elapsed. At this
point, they compared performance of the three eye-trackers and
asked the person wearing the eye-tracker with the poorest calibration to leave the room. Once the remaining two participants had
talked for another 20 min., all three were reunited in the recording
room and asked to complete the social questionnaires contained
in the study-packs. This was to ensure that questions about human
communication and behavior (verbal and non-verbal) would not
influence participants’ behavior during the conversations. (The
results from the social questionnaires are not of relevance for the
present analysis and will not be discussed any further.) Participants were then asked one more time for their written informed
consent relating to how their data should be handled, thanked,
and financially compensated for their participation (26 euro per
person). The entire test session lasted around 120 min. The study
was approved by the Social Sciences Faculty Ethics Committee,
Radboud University Nijmegen.
ANALYSIS

Question-response sequences

The present analysis focused on question–response (henceforth
QR) sequences in which the question was addressed to a single participant who then produced a response. All QR sequences
were identified by an experienced conversation analyst (Kobin H.
Kendrick), resulting in a total of 281 questions and their responses
(a subset of which was included in the final gaze shift analysis, see
Eye Gaze). Criteria for identifying QR sequences in our dataset

www.frontiersin.org

were based on the coding scheme proposed by Stivers and Enfield
(2010, pp. 2621–2626). The precise beginnings and endings of
the questions and the responses were determined in Praat 5.3.77
(Boersma and Weenink, 2014). In-breaths preceding responses
were clearly audible in our recordings and were treated as the onset
of the response (N = 35). In a small number of cases (N = 2) the
response was exclusively non-verbal (e.g., head nods); in those
cases the beginning of the response was timed to the first frame
of visible movement. These annotations were then imported into
ELAN 4.61 (Wittenburg et al., 2006).
Points of possible completion

All questions in the dataset were analyzed for the presence and
location of points of possible completions before the end of the
turn, drawing on conversation-analytic research on turn construction (Sacks et al., 1974; Ford and Thompson, 1996; Ford et al.,
2002). For a point of possible completion to be identified, the turn
at talk up to that point must have been hearable to the analyst as
a possibly complete question in its context. This determination
was made holistically, with attention to the syntax, prosody, and
meaning of the question. For those questions with a point of possible completion before the end of the turn, the precise location
of the first possible completion was annotated in ELAN. Crucially,
the participants’ gaze behavior was not considered in this analysis.
The analysis of points of possible completion revealed a number
of recurrent types. If a turn contained two complete questions, a
point of possible completion – represented here by a vertical bar –
was identified after the completion of the first, whether the two
questions were produced one after the other (e.g., “where does she

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 80

Holler and Kendrick

go? | where- where does she- what uni’s she from?”) or with a short
silence between the two (e.g., “but is it good? | (0.1) or is it just
(0.2) any money is good?”). If a turn contained a possibly complete
question together with an increment, a contingent addition to a
turn that continues its grammatical structure (Schegloff, 1996;
Couper-Kuhlen and Ono, 2007), a point of possible completion
was identified before the increment (e.g., “how are you finding
it by the way”; “were you on a bike | at that time?”). If the turn
contained a tag question, a frequent occurrence in the dataset, a
point of possible completion was identified before the tag (e.g.,
“there was like a fifth one | wasn’t there?; “you were at it too |
right?”). And if the turn contained a possibly complete question
followed by a turn component that could not have been projected
or anticipated in advance, a point of possible completion was
identified after the question (e.g., “all your family’s in England | I
expect?”; “so it’s on campus this place?”).
Interrater agreement between two coders (KK and JH) who
independently identified the presence and precise location of
points of possible completion in the dataset revealed strong
reliability, K = 0.72 (85.7% agreement; Landis and Koch, 1977).

Eye gaze

The ELAN files containing the QR annotations were linked to
the synchronized videos in order to annotate the unaddressed
participants’ eye movements during the QR sequences. These
annotations were done manually, on a frame-by-frame basis.
At each frame during the QR sequence, the gaze fixation point
generated by the SMI software for the unaddressed participant
(henceforth referred to as the gaze cursor) was categorized as being
(1) on speaker A, (2) on speaker B, (3) on self (e.g., when looking
at his or her own hands), (4) on the surroundings (e.g., the walls,
the door, any equipment items in the room), or (5) as not identifiable from the eye-tracker data (i.e., the eye-tracker cursor was
not visible in the respective video frames). Based on this coding
scheme, 45 of the originally 281 QR sequences (16.0%) were discarded from further analysis of the unaddressed participants’ eye
movements due to insufficient data. (Note that the eye movement
data of unaddressed participants is associated with considerably
more data loss than the eye movement data for speaker A and
speaker B. This is because, in our set-up, unaddressed participants
often move their heads as well as shift their gaze to look from the
current to the next speaker, and these movements tended to be
performed quite fast and with the eyes being closed during the
shift, thus obscuring the corneal reflection the eye-tracker needs
to capture).
Out of the remaining 235 QR sequences, unaddressed participants moved their gaze from speaker A to speaker B in 105
(45.5%) QR sequences. In order to be considered a valid gaze
shift for our analysis, the trajectory had to be one that clearly
moved from A to B, without the gaze pausing elsewhere in between
(such as on self or background objects). In the remaining 131
sequences, unaddressed participants either did not shift their gaze
at all and instead fixated speaker A, speaker B, themselves, or the
surroundings throughout, or they did move their eyes but in the
opposite direction, that is, from speaker B to speaker A. While
these cases are interesting in themselves, they tap into a different

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

phenomenon than the one under investigation here and require
analysis and discussion elsewhere.
Regarding those 105 QR sequences that did reveal a gaze shift
from speaker A to speaker B (i.e., our final QR dataset), the average
question duration was 2018 ms (Median = 1681 ms; minimum
value = 328 ms; maximum value = 7667 ms), and the average
response duration was 1899 ms (Median = 1312 ms; minimum
value = 164 ms; maximum value = 8118 ms). Due to the highly
dynamic nature of conversation brought about by, amongst other
things, differences in personality, age, gender, closeness of friendship, and topic of discussion, the seven triads of course differed
in the number of QR sequences they contributed to our analysis (they contributed 2, 8, 10, 12, 16, 22, and 35 QR sequences,
respectively). Likewise, participants within the triads differed in
the extent to which they contributed to the conversation by asking questions, but none of the conversations excluded participants
(and those that asked fewer questions may, of course, have contributed more to the conversation in other ways, such as through
tellings, jokes, responses, and so forth). Basing analyses of QR
sequences in conversation on samples that are determined by the
participants’spontaneous behavior, thus resulting in varying numbers of QR sequences across separate interactions, is the standard
procedure for corpus studies and in line with existing research
(e.g., Stivers et al., 2009, 2010; Gardner, 2010; Strömbergsson et al.,
2013).
For these 105 QR sequences that did reveal a shift of the
unaddressed participant’s gaze from speaker A to speaker B, we
identified when exactly this gaze shift occurred. The time window
we took into consideration for identifying gaze shifts relevant for
this analysis stretched from the beginning of A’s turn to the end of
B’s turn. In all cases of gaze shifting from speaker A to speaker B
within this time window, unaddressed participants looked at the
face of speaker A and then moved their gaze from there to the
face of speaker B. Using the frame-by-frame gaze annotations, we
identified the first frame at which the gaze cursor left speaker A,
defined as the frame at which the gaze cursor was no longer on,
overlapping with, or directly adjacent to speaker A’s head or technical head-gear (see Figure 3). At what time point before or during
B’s turn the unaddressed participant’s gaze arrived at speaker B was
not of relevance for the present analysis. Annotations were made in
ELAN to measure the duration from the first gaze shift away from
speaker A by the unaddressed participant to two points within the
question turn: (1) the end of the turn and (2) the first point of
possible completion of the question, for those questions that had
a possible completion before the end of the turn. In addition to
measuring the duration of these intervals (in ms), the values were
set as either positive or negative. This was done to identify the temporal order of the respective events, with negative values indicating
an anticipatory gaze shift before a point of possible completion or
the end of a turn and positive values indicating the inverse.
However, we need to consider that it takes time to plan and
launch these eye movements before they are observable. This process is estimated to take on average around 200 ms (Salthouse and
Ellis, 1980; Fischer and Ramsperger, 1984; Becker, 1991; Allopenna
et al., 1998; Griffin and Bock, 2000). We therefore calculated a value
for the beginning of the assumed planning phase for each observed
value by subtracting 200 ms.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 81

Holler and Kendrick

FIGURE 3 | Consecutive still images providing an example of an
unaddressed participant’s gaze shifting away from speaker A toward
speaker B during a QR sequence. Frames 1 and 2 capture instances of the

Gaze coding was performed by two independent coders (LD
and MvdG) blind to the study’s predictions and assumptions.
In addition, their coding was checked by one of the two senior
analysts (JH and KK), and any errors in coding (of which there
were remarkably few due to the clear categorical distinctions
between gaze locations) were discussed and corrected. Due to the
considerably more objective coding criteria applied for our gaze
analysis in comparison to the identification of points of possible completion, formal reliabilities were calculated for the latter
only.
Statistical analysis

All statistical analyses were conducted in R 3.1.1 (R Core Team,
2012). The density plots displayed in the Results section were generated using the Lattice package (Sarkar, 2008) with default kernel
density estimation (Gaussian). Since these distributions render a
smoothed curve (rather than a histogram) and an estimate of the
mode, all mode values given should be considered close approximations of the true value and decimal places are not stated for
those values. Note also that these distributions are based on binned
data brought about by our video frame rate providing a measure
every 41.7 ms (24 fps).

RESULTS
Out of the 105 QR sequences analyzed here, 54.3% (N = 57) of
the questions had at least one possible completion before the end
of the turn. Here, we focus our analyses first on the end of the turn

www.frontiersin.org

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

gaze cursor being classed as on speaker A (see coding criteria), whereas
frame 3 captures the first gaze shift away from speaker A (moving to speaker
B, frame 4).

and then on its first possible completion (which corresponded to
the end of the turn for 45.7% of questions).
EYE MOVEMENTS TIMED WITH RESPECT TO THE END OF TURNS

First, we measured the time point of each first observed gaze shift
away from speaker A (and toward speaker B) with respect to the
end of speaker A’s turn. This showed that the estimate of the mode
of these data is located very close to the end of the question, namely
just 50 ms prior to turn end (see Figure 4, solid line). Because, as we
have already noted, experimental research indicates that overt eye
movements are planned about 200 ms in advance of them being
observed, the covert initiation of unaddressed participants’ eye
movements from speaker A to speaker B occurred most frequently
around 250 ms prior to the end of questions (see Figure 4, dashed
line).
On the whole, 60.0% (N = 63) of QR sequences were associated
with observable gaze shifts that anticipated the end of the question
turn. When taking into account the time it takes to prepare these
gaze shifts, the percentage of anticipatory gaze shifts increases to
73.3% (N = 77).
EYE MOVEMENTS TIMED WITH RESPECT TO THE FIRST POSSIBLE
COMPLETION

Because many of the questions in our data had a point of possible completion prior to turn end (as seen above), we carried
out a second analysis in which we timed unaddressed participants’ first gaze shift away from speaker A with respect to the

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 82

Holler and Kendrick

FIGURE 4 | Unaddressed participants’ first gaze shift away from
speaker A to speaker B, measured with respect to the end of the
question (solid line = observed eye movements, dashed
line = planned eye movements). The zero point on the x -axis (ms) marks
the end of the question turn. The peak of the distribution represents the
estimate of the mode. Dots represent the individual datapoints.

first possible completion of each question; this corresponded to
the end of the turn for those questions with only one possible
completion. When plotting our data with respect to this reference point, the distribution yields a mode of about 160 ms
just after the first possible completion (see Figure 5, solid line).
Taking into account the 200 ms required to plan and launch
observed eye movements, the distribution yields a mode of 40 ms
just prior to the first possible completion (see Figure 5, dashed
line).
When timing the gaze shifts with respect to the first possible
completion of the question, we still see that a considerable number
of gaze shifts from current to next speaker happen prior to the first
possible completion, but much less so than when timing these gaze
shifts with respect to the end of the turn: in 34.3% (N = 36) of
cases, unaddressed participants shifted their gaze from current to
next speaker before the first possible completion, and in 55.2%
(N = 58) of cases unaddressed participants’ gaze shifts had at least
been planned prior to this point.
UNADDRESSED PARTICIPANTS’ EYE MOVEMENTS AND ADDRESSED
PARTICIPANTS’ RESPONSES

Above we have shown that unaddressed participants are sensitive
to first possible completions, as can be seen from the timing of
their gaze shifts. However, considering that first possible completions mark points at which transition to the next speaker becomes
relevant, addressed participants, too, are likely to be sensitive to
these points and time their responses to them. This means that the
first possible completion of speaker A’s question and the onset
of speaker B’s response may often coincide. We therefore also

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

FIGURE 5 | Unaddressed participants’ first gaze shift away from
speaker A to speaker B, measured with respect to the first possible
completion of the question (solid line = observed eye movements,
dashed line = planned eye movements). The zero point on the x -axis
(ms) marks the first possible completion of the turn. The peak of the
distribution represents the estimate of the mode. Dots represent the
individual datapoints.

measured the timing of the response2 to see whether its onset may
have attracted unaddressed recipients’ attention and thus account
for the timing of the gaze shifts we observed. And indeed, when we
tested this statistically on our data, the result yielded a significant
correlation between the unaddressed participants’ first gaze shift
from speaker A to speaker B and onset of speaker B’s response
[ρ(13) = 0.234, p < 0.05). This means that for responses that
coincide with first possible completions of questions, gaze shifts
could either be due to unaddressed participants recognizing the
possible completion or reacting to the onset of the response. In
order to tease these two factors apart, we carried out two further
analyses by looking at two subsets of our data.
For the first analysis, we considered only those QR sequences
where speaker A’s first possible completion and speaker B’s
response onset did not coincide but where the response comes
after the possible completion. For this comparison, we selected
2 This measure considers vocalization as well as inbreaths produced in preparation
for the response proper since preparatory inbreaths serve as pre-beginnings of turns
(Schegloff, 1996) and thereby signal an intention to speak. Gaps and overlaps (i.e.,
gaps with negative values) were thus measured as the duration from the end of
speaker’s A turn to the beginning of speaker B’s response, including audible inbreaths
(see Materials and Methods). For sequences in which questions had only one possible
completion (i.e., the first possible completion equated to the end of the turn),
responses most frequently occurred after a gap of approximately 120 ms (Mode
est. = 120 ms; Range = −943–1968 ms), with 31.3% (N =15) of responses in overlap
with the question. For sequences in which questions had more than one possible
completion (i.e., the first possible completion was not the end of the turn), the
picture was predictably more complex, as responses could begin with reference to
either of the two points. The distribution of gap durations in such sequences was
non-unimodal, with a plateau between two slight peaks at −500 and 20 ms, and
with 64.9% (N=37) of responses in overlap with the question.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 83

Holler and Kendrick

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

FIGURE 6 | Unaddressed participants’ first gaze shift away from
speaker A to speaker B for responses with an onset of 200 ms or more
after the first possible completion of the question. The zero point on the
x -axis (ms) marks the first possible completion of the turn. The peak of the
distribution represents the estimate of the mode. Dots represent the
individual datapoints.

FIGURE 7 | Unaddressed participants’ first gaze shift away from
speaker A to speaker B for responses with an onset of 200 ms or more
prior to the first possible completion of the question. The zero point on
the x -axis (ms) marks the first possible completion of the turn. The peak of
the distribution represents the estimate of the mode. Dots represent the
individual datapoints.

those sequences where the response occurred more than 200 ms3
after the first possible completion (N = 54). If the timing of
the unaddressed participants’ gaze shifts we observed based on
the sample as a whole is explained by response onset rather
than by first possible completions, then the mode for this subset of data should be at least 200 ms later than the mode for
the distribution based on the entire sample. However, as can
be gleaned from Figure 6, the mode for this subset is 105 ms
(Range = –2337–2419), which differs only slightly from the
mode of 160 ms for the entire sample. If anything, unaddressed
participants’ observed gaze shifts occur slightly earlier when B’s
response occurs 200 ms after the first possible completion, and
certainly no later than when we consider the entire sample. Thus,
unaddressed participants’ eye movements in our data do indeed
appear to reflect sensitivity to the first possible completion of the
question, rather than being a mere reaction to the onset of the
response.
However, we of course do acknowledge that response onset
may also play a role in the timing of unaddressed participants’
eye movements. In order to explore this further, we looked at
another subset of our data, namely those cases in which speaker
B’s response began at least 200 ms before speaker A’s first possible completion (N = 15). If response onset alone also attracts
unaddressed participants’ attention and, as a consequence, their
gaze, then we should see that the mode of the distribution of gaze
shifts for this subset is earlier than that for the distribution based
on the sample as a whole. As can be seen from Figure 7, this was
indeed the case, with the mode of observed gaze shifts for the

subset of early responses being −35 ms, compared to an overall
mode of 160 ms. This means that the eye movements within this
subset must have been planned −235 ms before the first possible
completion, which corresponds closely to the onset of these early
responses at −200 ms or less.

3 An earlier time point, such as 100 ms after the first possible completion, would also
have been a viable comparison, but we settled for 200 ms since the hypothesized
difference in modes would be clearer, and because the time needed to plan and
execute an observable gaze shift would by that point have elapsed.

www.frontiersin.org

DISCUSSION
The present study sought to investigate the precise timing of unaddressed participants’ eye movements during question–response
sequences by advancing on previous research in two important
ways. Firstly, we immersed the third person within the situated
context of a spontaneous, live conversation in which he or she
was a ratified participant (Goffman, 1979, 1981). Secondly, we
aimed to zoom further into the pattern of anticipation established in previous studies by taking into account the intricate
structure of questions in conversation. In addition, we here consider whether unaddressed participants’ eye movements during
question–response sequences are a turn-taking phenomenon per
se, or whether they reflect processes of a different conversational
order.
UNADDRESSED PARTICIPANTS TRACK CURRENT SPEAKERS

First of all, our analyses show that even when unaddressed participants are directly immersed in a conversation (rather than being
third-person observers of pre-recorded dialogs), they move their
gaze from one speaker to the next in about half of all question–
response sequences. This confirms that, even when participating
in actual ‘on-line’ interaction, unaddressed participants show a
tendency to track current speakers (cf., von Hofsten et al., 2009;
Foulsham et al., 2010; Tice and Henetz, 2011; Casillas and Frank,
2012, 2013; Edlund et al., 2012; Hirvenkari et al., 2013; Keitel et al.,
2013), at least during QR sequences.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 84

Holler and Kendrick

UNADDRESSED PARTICIPANTS SHIFT THEIR GAZE BEFORE TURN ENDS

When we examined the timing of gaze shifts with regard to turn
ends, we found that the most frequent gaze shifts from current to
next speaker were planned around 250 ms and observable around
50 ms prior to turn end. Thus, the results suggest that unaddressed
participants’ gaze shifts are predominantly anticipatory in nature
when timed with respect to the end of question turns. As such, it
replicates the findings from third-person perspective eye-tracking
studies that have found evidence for adults shifting their gaze to
the next speaker prior to turn end (e.g., Tice and Henetz, 2011;
Casillas and Frank, 2012). Overall, this suggests that the thirdperson perspective eye-tracking paradigm, at least when used with
adults and in the context of question–response sequences, serves as
a good experimental proxy for investigating the eye movements of
unaddressed participants in the context of turn-taking. A valuable
follow-up to the present study may be one that employs the video
recordings filmed from the unaddressed participants’ view in a
third-person perspective eye-tracking study as this would allow
for a more direct comparison with the situated behavior to further
corroborate this point.
However, despite the comparability, gaze shifts prior to turn end
appear to be more common in actual conversation. In the present
study, the majority of gaze shifts from current to next speaker
occurred prior to turn end (60% of cases) or were planned and
launched prior to this point (73% of cases). In contrast, in studies
using the third-person perspective paradigm, either only a relatively small proportion of gaze shifts occurred prior to turn end
(e.g., Tice and Henetz, 2011; Casillas and Frank, 2012) or none
at all did (e.g., Edlund et al., 2012; Hirvenkari et al., 2013). Keitel et al. (2013) found that 54% of their adults’ gaze shifts were
anticipatory in nature – a proportion much closer to the present
findings – but this percentage includes all gaze shifts made between
500 ms prior to the end of the current turn, as well as all gaze shifts
made during the on average 900 ms gap preceding the next turn.
It is therefore not possible to evaluate the extent to which these
gaze shifts were anticipatory with respect to the end of the current
turn, the measure we applied in the present study. In all, while
gaze shifts do appear to be more anticipatory in actual conversation than in off-line eye-tracking paradigms, we have to consider
that the present study focused exclusively on question–response
sequences rather than on a mixture of different turn types. Since
Casillas and Frank (2012) found a trend toward slightly stronger
anticipation for questions than for non-questions for adults, we
have to be mindful that this may also explain, or at least contribute, to the stronger pattern of anticipation found in the present
study.
UNADDRESSED PARTICIPANTS SHIFT THEIR GAZE AT POSSIBLE TURN
COMPLETIONS

The present study went further than just measuring eye movements with respect to turn ends. Here, we have taken into account
the intricate structure of questions, and, more specifically, the first
possible completion of each question, which for half of our questions was not the actual end of the turn. These points of possible
completion create opportunities for a next speaker to take the turn,
and it has been argued that participants in conversation are sensitive to these transition-relevance places (Sacks et al., 1974). Indeed,

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

our data seem to corroborate this: we found that, in the majority
of cases, unaddressed participants initiated the planning of their
gaze shifts most frequently just 40 ms prior to the first possible
completion of the turn. This time interval is shorter than the average duration of a single vowel in English (House, 1961; Umeda,
1975) and suggests that the planning of the most frequent gaze
shifts more or less coincides with the point in the current turn at
which transition between speakers first becomes relevant. Indeed,
our measurement of the location of possible completions within
a turn, which identifies them at the end of a word, is conservative. If the possible completion becomes recognizable even earlier,
for example, as the result of an increase in the duration of final
words or segments (see Local et al., 1986; Gravano and Hirschberg,
2011), the initiation of planning (i.e., the peak of the distribution in Figure 5) would occur after the possible completion, not
before.
Thus, rather than a pattern of anticipation, in which unaddressed participants project the ends of question turns in advance,
the virtual coincidence of possible completions and the onset of
planning suggests that unaddressed participants recognize points
of possible completion as they occur. That is, they seem to perceive specific cues closely associated with, and thus indicative
of, the emergence of possible completions. Wells and Macfarlane (1998) have argued that transition relevance places can be
defined in prosodic terms and that specific final major accents
of a current turn signal its upcoming completion (cf. Schegloff,
1996, on ‘pitch peaks’ as indications of possible completion).
They conclude that next speakers need not anticipate this accent;
they merely have to recognize it. However, even the recognition of final accents or pitch peaks is a process that unfolds over
time. The observation that gaze shifts are planned and launched
40 ms before the first possible completion of the current turn
could therefore be interpreted as projection on a micro-scale, as
it were, but it is something quite different from the long-range
projection that has been argued for by some. Schegloff (1987)
has proposed that the initial components of a turn can facilitate
the projection of how it will end, well before it reaches possible completion (see also Levinson, 2013). This means that the
grammatical structure of questions would allow unaddressed participants to shift their gaze to the next speaker at a very early
point during the question. Considering that addressees are nonverbally responsive as speakers’ utterances unfold (Clark and
Krych, 2004; Bavelas and Gerwing, 2011; Traum et al., 2012),
unaddressed participants may well feel inclined to gaze at the
next speaker as early as possible to see how the emerging utterance is received. However, the present findings suggest that early
projection of this kind does not govern the eye movements of
unaddressed participants as they redirect their gaze from current to next speakers in question–response sequences. We do
concede that unaddressed participants are likely to engage in
sequence projection processes from very early on, which tells participants what is coming next (a response; Schegloff, 2007), and
thus where to move their eyes (to the respective next speaker).
However, local cues associated with the emergence of possible completion, rather than early turn projection, appear to act
as a launch-signal by telling participants when to move their
eyes.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 85

Holler and Kendrick

Crucially, we have also shown that first possible completions
govern unaddressed participants’ gaze shifts in the absence of
an early response. First possible completions alone appear to
account for much of the data in our sample. (For 68.7% of
our QR sequences the onset of the response came after the first
possible completion.) At the same time, however, we have been
able to show that early responses which precede the first possible completion also attract unaddressed participants’ gaze, and
thus may certainly be a contributing factor in those instances
where first possible completion and onset of the response coincide. Hence, taking overlap between current and next speakers
into account appears crucial if we aim to understand unaddressed
participants’ eye movements in natural conversation. Importantly, the effect of both factors – first possible completions and
response onset – is based on a process of recognition rather than
projection.
OPTIMIZING RECIPIENCY

To date, all studies of the phenomenon under investigation here –
the redirection of gaze by unaddressed participants from current
to next speakers at turn transitions – have used it to gain insight
into processes involved in turn-taking. But the conclusion that the
eye movements of unaddressed participants do not anticipate the
first possible completion of the current turn, and thus do not necessarily reflect a projection of it, leads us to reconsider the nature
of the phenomenon and to look elsewhere for principles that can
account for the fine temporal coordination that we observe.
It has long been argued that among the many functions of
gaze behavior in social interaction the use of gaze to display
attention, engagement in the interaction, and recipiency to the
current speaker is paramount (Goodwin, 1980, 1981; Heath, 1984,
1986; Kidwell, 1997; Robinson, 1998; Ruusuvuori, 2001; Ford
and Stickle, 2012). Gazing at the current speaker not only shows
one to be an attentive participant, whether directly addressed
by the turn or not, but it also allows one to tap into the rich
stream of visible behaviors that accompany turns at talk. Our
results reveal that unaddressed participants redirect their gaze at
a moment that is interactionally most optimal: by moving their
eyes away from the current speaker not at the beginning of the
question but close to its completion, unaddressed participants
secure access to as much of the current speaker’s visible bodily
behavior as possible, including torso, head, and hand gestures, as
well as lip movements and facial expressions that accompany the
communicative action; at the same time, they also secure access
to much of the next speaker’s visual response to the question.
Further, keeping their gaze on the current speaker until a very
late point during the question allows unaddressed participants to
display recipiency throughout most of the question, just as the
reorientation to the addressed participant at the completion of
the question allows them to do for the response. Both of these
aspects, the visual behavior of speakers and its temporal coordination with possible turn completions, as well as the use of gaze
for displaying and managing recipiency in multi-person interaction, are currently being investigated in more detail. This will help
us to unravel the specific ways in which these factors contribute
to the processing of turns and the organization of gaze in social
interaction.

www.frontiersin.org

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

Although the gaze behavior of unaddressed participants does
not necessarily reflect projection of the current turn, optimizing
recipiency between current and next speakers does make use of
the turn-taking system in other ways. Our results provide new and
quantitative evidence that the recognition of points of possible
completions are indeed core to the turn-taking system in conversation, as argued in Sacks et al.’s (1974) seminal paper. Moreover, it
appears that not only addressed but also momentarily unaddressed
participants orient to possible completions as they process turns
at talk. This observation further underscores the point by Sacks
et al. (1974, p. 727) that the organization of turn-taking creates
an “intrinsic motivation for listening.” One who wishes to have a
turn at talk must attend to and process the current turn in order
to recognize a point at which transition between speakers may
occur. Even unaddressed participants, who do not take a turn
in the question–response sequences in our data, show evidence
in their gaze behavior of a fine attunement to this feature of the
turn-taking system4 . Our findings that unaddressed participants’
gaze behavior during question–response sequences appears to be
organized according to a principle that optimizes recipiency also
fits well with the notion of an ‘intrinsic motivation for participation,’ as it were (Schilbach et al., 2010; Pfeiffer et al., 2014).
Both Schilbach et al. (2010) and Pfeiffer et al. (2014) demonstrate
that, in the context of gaze-based interactions, humans experience social-interactional engagement as rewarding, as evidenced
by cerebral activity patterns in reward-related neurocircuitry.
In addition, it appears from our results that response onset can
trump first possible completions, at least when these responses
come prior to the first possible completion. In such cases, the timing of the response appears marked and may signal a marked social
action (see Vatanen, 2014). That unaddressed participants orient
their gaze toward the participant issuing a response of this status,
despite the current turn not yet having reached its first possible
completion, neatly fits the principle of optimizing recipiency.
The present study looked at eye movements with respect to one
particular type of turn, that is, questions. Casillas and Frank (2012)
found a marginally significant effect indicating that, in thirdperson perspective paradigms, adults show a stronger tendency
to shift their gaze from current to next speaker – and a trend for
this happening slightly earlier – for questions than non-questions.
Corpus research on the timing of turn-taking in spontaneous conversation, however, found that participants responded as quickly
to questions as to non-questions (Stivers et al., 2009). Further
research on different types of turns is thus clearly needed and
may help to explain why analyses that have combined questions
with other turn types have not found evidence of anticipatory
eye movements (Hirvenkari et al., 2013). Moreover, the present
study focused on those question–response sequences that were
associated with patterns of gaze behavior which would allow us
to draw conclusions about unaddressed participants’ cognitive
processes relating to the anticipation of turn ends and upcoming
responses. Question–response sequences associated with different
4 Note that, while our analysis suggests a close coordination of eye gaze and turn
structure, this does not exclude the possibility that participants’ gaze is not also
organized with respect to the structure of larger sequences and courses of actions
(Rossano, 2012).

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 86

Holler and Kendrick

gaze patterns (such as unaddressed participants continuing to gaze
at the questioner throughout the entire sequence) are not informative in this respect. Note that we are not suggesting that entirely
different cognitive processes are at work in those cases. Quite the
opposite – while it is very likely that unaddressed participants
recognize possible turn completions also during those kinds of
question–response sequences, other processes appear to be governing their eye movements causing them not to shift their gaze
toward the responder at this point. What exactly these processes
are is an open question and certainly worthy of future research,
but they address a different question to the one under investigation
here.

CONCLUSION
The present study has provided us with a first glimpse of the
intricate connections between turns at talk and unaddressed
participants’ eye movements in spontaneous, multi-person interaction. On the one hand, we have here reproduced the basic
findings from studies using the third-person perspective eyetracking paradigm in spontaneous, live conversation. On the other,
our data have provided us with stronger evidence that gaze shifts
by unaddressed participants toward next speakers precede the end
of the current turn than previous studies have. As such, our findings corroborate the notion that interactive paradigms do, at least
in part, provide different insights than paradigms involving passive observation (Schilbach, 2010, 2014; Wilms et al., 2010; Pfeiffer
et al., 2013; Schilbach et al., 2013). Further, the present study has
advanced our understanding of which structures in the current
turn guide unaddressed participants’ eye movements in conversation and has helped to clarify the role that the projection of the
current turn plays in this process. While our findings underline
the general usefulness of third-person paradigms, they also point
toward some of the limitations associated with this approach.
Moreover, they point to the urgent need to consider not just actual
turn ends but also first possible turn completions when measuring and interpreting eye movements during turns at talk. Finally,
the present study has allowed us to identify a new interactional
phenomenon, the optimization of recipiency, which appears to
account for much of the gaze behavior of unaddressed participants
during turn-taking.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Linda Drijvers, Ludy Clissen, and Marloes
van der Goot for their assistance with data preparation and coding,
the Technical Group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics (especially
Nick Wood, Ronald Fischer, and Reiner Dirksmeier) and SMI
(especially Martin Pötter) for their technical advice and assistance
throughout, Han Sloetjes (MPI) for his assistance with ELAN, as
well as the participants who took part in our study. We would
also like to thank the Language and Cognition Department (especially Stephen Levinson) and members of the Dialog Project at
the MPI for their valuable feedback and discussion of this work,
and the European Research Council (Advanced Grant #269484
INTERACT awarded to Stephen Levinson) and the Max Planck
Gesellschaft for funding this research. We would also like to thank
the two reviewers of our manuscript for their valuable input and
thoughtful suggestions.

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

REFERENCES
Allopenna, P. D., Magnuson, J. S., and Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Tracking the time
course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: evidence for continuous
mapping models. J. Mem. Lang. 38, 419–439. doi: 10.1006/jmla.1997.2558
Argyle, M., and Cook, M. (1976). Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Argyle, M., Ingham, R., Alkema, F., and McCallin, M. (1973). The different functions
of gaze. Semiotica 7, 19–32. doi: 10.1515/semi.1973.7.1.19
Auer, P. (2005). Projection in interaction and projection in grammar. TextInterdiscip. J. Study Discourse 25, 7–36.
Augusti, E. M., Melinder, A., and Gredebäck, G. (2010). Look who’s talking: preverbal infants’ perception of face-to-face and back-to-back social interactions.
Front. Psychol. 1:161. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00161
Bavelas, J. B., Coates, L., and Johnson, T. (2002). Listener responses as a collaborative
process: the role of gaze. J. Commun. 52, 566–580. doi: 10.1111/j.14602466.2002.tb02562.x
Bavelas, J. B., and Gerwing, J. (2011). The listener as addressee in face-to-face
dialogue. Int. J. Listen. 25, 178–198. doi: 10.1080/10904018.2010.508675
Becker, W. (1991). “Saccades,” in Vision and Visual Dysfunction, Vol. 8, Eye
Movements, ed. R. H. S. Carpenter (London: Macmillan), 95–137.
Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2014). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer
program]. Version 5.3.82. Available at: http://www.praat.org/ [accessed July 26,
2014].
Bolden, G. B. (2013). Unpacking “self ” repair and epistemics in conversation. Soc.
Psychol. Q. 76, 314–342. doi: 10.1177/0190272513498398
Brône, G., and Oben, B. (2014). Insight interaction: a multimodal and multifocal
dialogue corpus. Lang. Resour. Eval. doi: 10.1007/s10579-014-9283-2
Cary, M. S. (1978). The role of gaze in the initiation of conversation. Soc. Psychol.
41, 269–271. doi: 10.2307/3033565
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2012). “Cues to turn boundary prediction in adults
and preschoolers,” in Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial): The 16th Workshop
on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, eds S. Brown-Schmidt, J. Ginzburg,
and S. Larsson (Paris: Université Paris-Diderot), 61–69.
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2013). “The development of predictive processes
in children’s discourse understanding,” in Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, eds M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, and
I. Wachsmuth (Austin, TX: Cognitive Society), 299–304.
Clark, H. H., and Carlson, T. B. (1982). Hearers and speech acts. Language 58,
332–373. doi: 10.1353/lan.1982.0042
Clark, H. H., and Krych, M. A. (2004). Speaking while monitoring addressees for
understanding. J. Mem. Lang. 50, 62–81. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2003.08.004
Cook, M. (1977). Gaze and mutual gaze in social encounters: how long—and
when—we look others “in the eye” is one of the main signals in nonverbal
communication. Am. Sci. 65, 328–333.
Couper-Kuhlen, E., and Ono, T. (2007). “Incrementing” in conversation. A
comparison of practices in English, German and Japanese. Pragmatics 17,
513–552.
De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
Duncan, S., Brunner, L. J., and Fiske, D. W. (1979). Strategy signals in face-to-face
interaction. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 37, 301–313. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.37.2.301
Edlund, J., Alexandersson, S., Beskow, J., Gustavsson, L., Heldner, M., Hjalmarsson,
A., et al. (2012). “3rd party observer gaze as a continuous measure of dialogue
flow,” in Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation (LREC-2012), Istanbul.
Fischer, B., and Ramsperger, E. (1984). Human express saccades: extremely short
reaction times of goal directed eye movements. Exp. Brain Res. 57, 191–195. doi:
10.1007/BF00231145
Ford, C. E., Fox, B. A., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). Practices in the construction of
turns: the“ TCU” revisited. Pragmatics 6, 427–454.
Ford, C. E., Fox, B. A., and Thompson, S. A. (2002). “Constituency and the grammar
of turn increments,” in The Language of Turn and Sequence, eds C. E. Ford, B. Fox,
and S. A. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 14–38.
Ford, C. E., and Stickle, T. (2012). Securing recipiency in workplace meetings:
multimodal practices. Discourse Stud. 14, 11–30. doi: 10.1177/1461445611427213
Ford, C. E., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). “Interactional units in conversation:
syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns,”

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 87

Holler and Kendrick

in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S. A. Thompson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 134–184.
Foulsham, T., Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., Henrich, J., and Kingstone, A. (2010). Gaze
allocation in a dynamic situation: effects of social status and speaking. Cognition
117, 319–331. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.003
Gardner, R. (2010). Question and answer sequences in Garrwa talk. Aus. J. Linguist.
30, 423–445. doi: 10.1080/07268602.2010.518554
Goffman, E. (1979). Footing. Semiotica 25, 1–30. doi: 10.1515/semi.1979.25.1-2.1
Goffman, E. (1981). “Footing,” in Forms of Talk, ed. E. Goffman (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press), 124–157.
Goodwin, C. (1980). Restarts, pauses, and the achievement of a state of
mutual gaze at turn-beginning. Sociol. Inq. 50, 272–302. doi: 10.1111/j.1475682X.1980.tb00023.x
Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and
Hearers. New York: Academic Press.
Gravano, A., and Hirschberg, J. (2011). Turn-taking cues in task-oriented dialogue.
Comput. Speech Lang. 25, 601–634. doi: 10.1016/j.csl.2010.10.003
Griffin, Z. M., and Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychol. Sci.
11, 274–279. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00255
Heath, C. (1984). “Talk and recipiency: sequential organization in speech and body
movement”in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, eds J. M.
Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 247–265.
Heath, C. (1986). Body Movement and Speech in Medical Interaction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511628221
Heldner, M., and Edlund, J. (2010). Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversation.
J. Phon. 38, 555–568. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2010.08.002
Hirvenkari, L., Ruusuvuori, J., Saarinen, V.-M., Kivioja, M., Peräkylä, A., and Hari,
R. (2013). Influence of turn-taking in a two-person conversation on the gaze of a
viewer. PLoS ONE 8:e71569. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071569
House, A. S. (1961). On vowel duration in English. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 33, 1174–1178.
doi: 10.1121/1.1908941
Indefrey, P. (2011). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components: a critical update. Front. Psychol. 2:255. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00255
Indefrey, P., and Levelt, W. J. M. (2004). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components. Cognition 92, 101–144. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2002.06.001
Itier, R. J., and Batty, M. (2009). Neural bases of eye and gaze processing:
the core of social cognition. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 33, 843–863. doi:
10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.02.004
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on “latency” in overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.
doi: 10.1007/BF00148125
Keitel, A., Prinz, W., Friederici, A. D., Hofsten, C. V., and Daum, M. M. (2013). Perception of conversations: the importance of semantics and intonation in children’s
development. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 116, 264–277. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2013.06.005
Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta
Psychol. 26, 22–63. doi: 10.1016/0001-6918(67)90005-4
Kendon, A. (1990). Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behaviour in Focused
Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendrick, K. H., and Torreira, F. (2014). The timing and construction of preference:
a quantitative study. Discourse Process. doi: 10.1080/0163853X.2014.955997
Kidwell, M. (1997). Demonstrating recipiency: knowledge displays as a resource for
the unaddressed participant. Issues Appl. Linguist. 8, 85–96.
Kleinke, C. L. (1986). Gaze and eye contact: a research review. Psychol. Bull. 100,
78–100. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.100.1.78
Kobayashi, H., and Kohshima, S. (2001). Unique morphology of the human eye and
its adaptive meaning: comparative studies on external morphology of the primate
eye. J. Hum. Evol. 40, 419–435. doi: 10.1006/jhev.2001.0468
Landis, J. R., and Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for
categorical data. Biometrics 33, 159–174. doi: 10.2307/2529310
Lerner, G. H. (2003). Selecting next speaker: the context-sensitive operation of a context-free organization. Lang. Soc. 32, 177–201. doi:
10.1017/S004740450332202X
Levinson, S. C. (1988). “Putting linguistics on a proper footing: explorations in
Goffman’s participation framework,” in Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order,
eds P. Drew and A. Wootton (Oxford: Polity Press), 161–227.
Levinson, S. C. (2013). “Action formation and ascription,” in The Handbook of
Conversation Analysis, eds J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell),
101–130.

www.frontiersin.org

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

Local, J., Kelly, J., and Wells, W. H. (1986). Towards a phonology of conversation: turn-taking in Tyneside English. J. Linguist. 22, 411–437. doi:
10.1017/S0022226700010859
Local, J., and Walker, G. (2012). How phonetic features project more talk. J. Int.
Phon. Assoc. 42, 255–280. doi: 10.1017/S0025100312000187
Magyari, L., Bastiaansen, M. C. M., de Ruiter, J. P., and Levinson, S. C. (2014). Early
anticipation lies behind the speed of response in conversation. J. Cogn. Neurosci.
26, 2530–2539. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00673
Magyari, L., and de Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on anticipation
of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00376
Pfeiffer, U. J., Schilbach, L., Timmermans, B., Kuzmanovic, B., Georgescu, A. L.,
Bente, G., et al. (2014). Why we interact: on the functional role of the striatum
in the subjective experience of social interaction. Neuroimage 101, 124–137. doi:
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.06.061
Pfeiffer, U. J., Vogeley, K., and Schilbach, L. (2013). From gaze cueing to
dual eye-tracking: novel approaches to investigate the neural correlates of
gaze in social interaction. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 37, 2516–2528. doi:
10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.07.017
R Core Team. (2012). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R
Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Available at: http://www.Rproject.org/
Robinson, J. D. (1998). Getting down to business talk, gaze, and body orientation
during openings of doctor-patient consultations. Hum. Commun. Res. 25, 97–
123. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2958.1998.tb00438.x
Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze Behavior in Face-to-Face Interaction. Ph.D. thesis, Radboud
University, Nijmegen.
Rossano, F., Brown, P., and Levinson, S. C. (2009). “Gaze, questioning, and culture,”
in Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives, ed. J. Sidnell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 197–249.
Ruusuvuori, J. (2001). Looking means listening: coordinating displays of engagement in doctor-patient interaction. Soc. Sci. Med. 52, 1093–1108. doi:
16/S0277-9536(00)00227-6
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.2307/412243
Salthouse, T. A., and Ellis, C. L. (1980). Determinants of eye-fixation duration. Am.
J. Psychol. 93, 207–234. doi: 10.2307/1422228
Sarkar, D. (2008). Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization With R. New York, NY:
Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-0-387-75969-2
Schegloff, E. A. (1987). “Recycled turn beginnings: a precise repair mechanism
in conversation’s turn-taking organisation,” in Talk and Social Organisation, eds
G. Button and J. Lee (Phiadelphia: Multilingual Matters), 70–93.
Schegloff, E. A. (1996). “Turn organization: one direction for inquiry into grammar
and interaction,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and
S. A. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 52–133.
Schegloff, E. A. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for
conversation. Lang. Soc. 29, 1–63. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500001019
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer
in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:
10.1017/CBO9780511791208
Schilbach, L. (2010). A second-person approach to other minds. Nat. Rev. Neurosci.
11, 449–449. doi: 10.1038/nrn2805-c1
Schilbach, L. (2014). On the relationship of online and offline social cognition.
Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8:278. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00278
Schilbach, L., Timmermans, B., Reddy, V., Costall, A., Bente, G., Schlicht, T., et al.
(2013). Toward a second-person neuroscience. Behav. Brain Sci. 36, 393–414. doi:
10.1017/S0140525X12000660
Schilbach, L., Wilms, M., Eickhoff, S. B., Romanzetti, S., Tepest, R., Bente, G., et al.
(2010). Minds made for sharing: initiating joint attention recruits reward-related
neurocircuitry. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 22, 2702–2715. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21401
Selting, M. (1996). On the interplay of syntax and prosody in the constitution of turn-constructional units and turns in conversation. Pragmatics 6,
371–388.
Selting, M. (2000). The construction of units in conversational talk. Lang. Soc. 29,
477–517. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500004012
Senju, A., and Johnson, M. H. (2009). The eye contact effect: mechanisms
and development. Trends Cogn. Sci. 13, 127–134. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.
11.009

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 88

Holler and Kendrick

Stivers, T., and Enfield, N. J. (2010). A coding scheme for question–
response sequences in conversation. J. Pragmat. 42, 2620–2626. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.002
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann,
T., et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587. doi: 10.1073/pnas.09036
16106
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., and Levinson, S. C. (2010). Question–response sequences
in conversation across ten languages: an introduction. J. Pragmat. 42, 2615–2619.
doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.001
Strömbergsson, S., Hjalmarsson, A., Edlund, J., and House, D. (2013). “Timing
responses to questions in dialogue,” in Proceedings of the Interspeech, Lyon, 2584–
2588.
Tice, M., and Henetz, T. (2011). “Turn-boundary projection: looking ahead,” in
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, eds
L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, and T. Shipley (Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society),
838–843.
Traum, D., DeVault, D., Lee, J., Wang, Z., and Marsella, S. (2012). “Incremental
dialogue understanding and feedback for multiparty, multimodal conversation,”
in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 7502: Intelligent Virtual Agents, eds
Y. Nakano, M. Neff, A. Paiva, and M. Walker (Berlin Heidelberg: Springer),
275–288.
Umeda, N. (1975). Vowel duration in American English. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 58,
434–445. doi: 10.1121/1.380688
Vatanen, A. (2014). Responding in Overlap: Agency, Epistemicity and Social Action in
Conversation. Ph.D. thesis, University of Helsinki, Helsinki.
von Hofsten, C., Uhlig, H., Adell, M., and Kochukhova, O. (2009). How children with autism look at events. Res. Autism Spectr. Disord. 3, 556–569. doi:
10.1016/j.rasd.2008.12.003

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Gaze, projection, and recipiency in turn-taking

Wells, B., and Macfarlane, S. (1998). Prosody as an interactional
resource: turn-projection and overlap. Lang. Speech 41, 265–294. doi:
10.1177/002383099804100403
Wilms, M., Schilbach, L., Pfeiffer, U., Bente, G., Fink, G. R., and Vogeley, K. (2010).
It’s in your eyes: using gaze feedback to create truly interactive paradigms for
social cognitive and affective neuroscience. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 5, 98–107.
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq024
Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., and Sloetjes, H. (2006).
“ELAN: A professional framework for multimodality research,” in Proceedings of
the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC
2006), Nijmegen, 1556–1559.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted
in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed
as a potential conflict of interest.
Received: 20 November 2014; accepted: 19 January 2015; published online: 09 February
2015.
Citation: Holler J and Kendrick KH (2015) Unaddressed participants’ gaze in
multi-person interaction: optimizing recipiency. Front. Psychol. 6:98. doi: 10.3389/
fpsyg.2015.00098
This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in
Psychology.
Copyright © 2015 Holler and Kendrick. This is an open-access article distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution
or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor
are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with
accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which
does not comply with these terms.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 98 | 89

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 26 August 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01113

Action-projection in Japanese
conversation: topic particles wa, mo,
and tte for triggering categorization
activities
Hiroko Tanaka *
Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

Edited by:
Kobin H. Kendrick,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Makoto Hayashi,
University of Illinois, USA
Emi Morita,
National University of Singapore,
Singapore
*Correspondence:
Hiroko Tanaka,
Department of Sociology, University of
Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester,
CO4 3SQ Essex, UK
htanaka@essex.ac.uk

Conversation analytic work has revealed how anticipatory completions and preemptive
actions can offer invaluable glimpses into the cognitive, contextual, grammatical, and
temporal bases of projectability in turn-taking, by virtue of their potential not only as
a display of participants’ online prediction of roughly what it might take to complete a
turn-in-progress but also to plan the next move. While the predicate-final word order
and the incremental transformability of turns in Japanese generally lead to delayed
projectability of turn-endings, this may be partially offset by the capacity of certain
postpositional particles to trigger and propel prospective action trajectories. This article
engages in a case study of the topic particle wa (and related particles mo and tte),
by demonstrating how its grammatical affordances, the categorization activities, and
cognitive processing it can set in motion, coupled with the immediate contextual,
and temporal-productional features may coalesce to a point of critical mass, thereby
enhancing the projectability of the not-yet-produced trajectory of the current turn.
The discussion attempts to contribute to recent debates on ways language-specific
lexicogrammatical resources are deeply interlinked with the types of opportunities that
are provided for social action.
Keywords: conversation analysis, anticipatory completion, preemptive action, projectability, Japanese
conversation, topic particle wa, membership categorization device, set theory

Introduction
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 16 February 2015
Accepted: 20 July 2015
Published: 26 August 2015
Citation:
Tanaka H (2015) Action-projection in
Japanese conversation: topic particles
wa, mo, and tte for triggering
categorization activities.
Front. Psychol. 6:1113.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01113

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

The Phenomenon
The aim of this article is to demonstrate the potential for the situated use of the topic particle wa in
Japanese conversation to serve as a powerful resource for locally projecting the possible trajectory
of a turn-in-progress by activating and implementing a range of cognitive operations involving
categorization activities. I focus mainly on the particle wa while touching upon related roles
played by other particles including tte and mo (wa roughly glossed as “as for”; tte as “concerning”;
whereas mo would be crudely equivalent to “also”). While the types of particles under consideration
here are variously labeled “adverbial,” “topic” or “focus” in the literature, they will be referred to
as “topic particles” for simplicity (see Section Previous Research on wa). The abovementioned
capacity of wa to strongly project action trajectories may be mobilized by participants in order
to trigger and propel forward anticipatory completions and even preemptive actions through
engaging in categorization activities, leading to a classification or re-classification of the universe of
discourse.
August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 90

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

As an illustration, in the following excerpt, the contingent
use of wa (line 2) provides an opportunity for a coparticipant
to implement a preemptive response (line 3). Four women have
been asked to discuss their preferences in men. A participant L
has characterized “narcissistic men” as “fun” to have as friends.

different researchers in accordance with recommendations
pertaining to human subjects of the local review boards of the
universities to which they respectively belong. In each case,
informed consent was freely given by all participants, and the
data collected have been handled according to the Statement

(1) [Sakura 07] Preferences
1

D:

2

tte iu ka tabun
atashi wa
kojinteki ni:
QUOT say QP probably I
as.for personally P
or, should ((I)) say, probably, as for me
yo
de
iu ikemen
wa- (.)
society LOC say good.looking.men
as.for
s for men who are conventionally considered good looking,

3

F:

iya
da.
dislike COP
dislike ((them))

4

D:

chotto ne.
little FP
bit, you know

In line 1, D begins to formulate an assessment, by using atashi
“me” and kojinteki ni “personally” to set the frame for the
ensuing talk (Ono and Thompson, 2003, p. 332). She then
introduces a referent “men who are conventionally considered
good looking” (highlighted by a border) which is marked with
wa (line 2). On hearing this turn-beginning (lines 1–2), F
preemptively proffers her own assessment of the referent (line 3)
by appropriating the grammatical slot made available by D’s
turn-beginning and constructing her turn as a grammatical
continuation1 . In other words, what D is projecting is being
treated as so apparent that, for all practical purposes, it is seen
to be sufficient not only for grasping D’s intended action but
for going one step further to formulate a response to it. D
endorses F’s action (line 4), thereby confirming F’s understanding
as implied in line 3. Through a close scrutiny of instances
such as this where a wa-marked “reference formulation”
(see Ford et al., 2013) triggers anticipatory completions or
preemptive actions, I hope to shed light on the synergistic
effect of the contextualization work performed by prior talk, the
proximate temporal-productional features, and the grammatical
and cognitive operations implemented by wa, for cumulatively
laying the groundwork for augmenting the projectability of
emerging turns.
The database for this study comprises approximately 20 h
of telephone conversations and audio- or video-recorded faceto-face interaction among native speakers of Japanese, mainly
from the Kanto or Kansai regions. Some of the data, including
the Sakura corpus, are from publically available databases from
TalkBank (MacWhinney, 2007), and relevant segments have been
retranscribed by the author. Other data were collected by several
1 F accomplishes this in part by leaving unexpressed any first person marking and
partly through use of the copula da to mark the assessment as her own. Szczepek
(2000a,b) discusses a similar practice in English of “borrowing” the construction of
a prior turn to produce one’s turn.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

of Ethical Practice for the British Sociological Association (March
2002), including guidelines for the sharing of data collected for
reuse in other projects. The excerpts selected for presentation in
this article are drawn from the following conversations:
1. Sakura 07, Sakura 13, YKH 1, YKH 2 (video recordings of
multi-party conversations)
2. IMD (telephone conversation)
3. Wedding Planning, MFriends (audio recordings of multiparty conversations)
Although space constraints limit consideration to nine excerpts,
they are representative of recurrent patterns observed in the
larger database. Please refer to the Supplementary Material for
transcription notations and set-theoretic symbols used in this
article. In the excerpts, boldface is used to highlight the topic
particles under consideration, and the referents they mark are
encased in a border .

Japanese Conversational Grammar and
Projectability
This article builds on work in “interactional linguistics” (e.g.,
Ochs et al., 1996; Selting and Couper-Kuhlen, 2001; Thompson
and Couper-Kuhlen, 2005; Couper-Kuhlen and Ono, 2007) and
“projectability” in Japanese. Prior research has investigated the
role of various grammatical elements for action projection in
Japanese: a limited list including connectives (Mori, 1999),
conjunctive particles (Hayashi, 1999; Lerner and Takagi, 1999;
Tanaka, 1999), adverbials (Tanaka, 2001a), adverbial and case
particles (Tanaka, 1999, 2005), complementizers (Maynard,
1993; Hayashi, 1997; Matsumoto, 1998; Tanaka, 2001b), final
particles (Morita, 2005, 2012), postpositions (Hayashi, 2000,
2001, 2003, 2004), predicate-final structure (Nakamura, 2009),
and micro-segmentation of units (Iwasaki, 2008, 2009, 2011,
2013a).

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 91

Tanaka

The above works show that projectability is closely connected
with the structures of syntactic and prosodic resources of the
language. Work in conversation analysis and allied perspectives
in Japanese have shown that even though different word orders
are preferred depending on the type of social action a turn is
performing (e.g., Ono and Suzuki, 1992; Tanaka, 2005), there is
nevertheless a predicate-final orientation in Japanese in the sense
that the production of a predicate component is normatively
treated as a possible transition-relevance place (Tanaka, 1999,
2000; Nakamura, 2009). Given that the action of a turn is
often embodied within the predicate (Thompson and CouperKuhlen, 2005), the projectability of turns in Japanese is regularly
delayed until the predicate has been produced (Fox et al., 1996;
Tanaka, 1999). The limited projectability of turn-trajectories,
however, is to some extent offset by the pervasive use of certain
postpositional particles—“case” and “adverbial” particles in
particular—which serve as resources for incrementally projecting
the potential unfolding of a turn-in-progress (Tanaka, 1999).
Case and adverbial particles are devices that retroactively specify
the grammatical sense of the immediately preceding nominal that
it “marks” (e.g., as a subject, topic, object, indirect object, etc.),
and “establish a grammatical linkage with that nominal to form
constituents of the form [nominal + postposition]” (Hayashi,
2004, p. 348).
Furthermore, case and adverbial particles (including topic
particles) have the additional property of projecting some
nominal or predicate component (a predicate in the case of
topic particles) which may follow the particle within the local
interactional environment (Tanaka, 1999), as schematized in
Figure 1.
Applying Figure 1 to excerpt (1), D’s production of the
referent yo de iu ikemen “men who are conventionally considered
good looking” (line 2) together with the attachment of wa,
forms a reference formulation NP + wa “as for men who are
conventionally considered good looking,” which serves a dual
purpose here. First, the reference formulation provides a basis for
F to predict a possible predicate that is being projected. Second, F
proffers an agreement with what is predicted Iya da. “((I)) dislike
((them)),” which is grammatically fitted as a continuation of the
reference formulation.
Even though the marking of a nominal phrase with a topic
particle thus opens up a grammatical slot for a forthcoming
predicate, it is not always possible to project or predict with

FIGURE 1 | Projective and retroactive properties of case and adverbial
particles. (Adapted from Hayashi, 2004, p. 350; Tanaka, 1999, p. 155).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

accuracy the kind of predicate that may be supplied (Tanaka,
1999, pp. 177–182). To wit, in spite of the ubiquity of wa
within conversational interaction, most instances of wa do
not in fact occasion anticipatory completions or preemptive
actions. Despite the key role of grammar in turn-projection,
it should be underscored that it is only one out of the range
of resources coparticipants mobilize for predicting the possible
turn-trajectory, most significantly the immediate interactional
environment, sequential context, and productional features
of the turn-in-progress (Lerner, 1991, 1996, 2004; Liddicoat,
2004).
Studies on the social actions performed by postpositional
particles have frequently touched upon the utility of wa for
projecting the unfolding trajectory of turns (Hayashi, 1999, 2000,
2001, 2004; Tanaka, 1999, 2005). However, there is little in-depth
research in conversation analysis specifically on the interactional
role of wa or on the possibility that its projective capacity may
hinge on the situated categorization activities it may be used to
implement (but see Takagi, 2001).

Previous Research on wa
The potential roles and functions of wa in Japanese discourse
have been discussed extensively by linguists, and have been at
the center of countless debates, though a majority of the claims
are based on invented or non-interactional data (see Shibatani,
1990, pp. 262–280; also Kuno, 1973; Clancy and Downing, 1987;
Iwasaki, 1987, 2013b; Martin, 1987; Suzuki, 1995; Kaiser et al.,
2001; Wlodarczyk, 2005, etc.). Shibatani (1990, p. 338) refers to
wa and mo as “topic particles.” Kaiser et al. classify wa and mo
as “focus particles” but distinguish the two by suggesting that
whereas mo focuses on the nominal that it follows, wa primarily
focuses on the predicate that follows (Kaiser et al., 2001, p. 577).
They add, “wa is often called a topic P (particle), because it
typically marks the topic of a topic-comment type S (sentence).
The focus in these S again is on the comment or pred(icate).”
(Kaiser et al., 2001, p. 577, parentheses added). In relation to
broader grammatical groupings, Tsujimura (1996, p. 134) sees the
topic particle wa as a type of case particle, but Shibatani (1990)
distinguishes case from adverbial particles, and classifies wa, mo,
and tte as adverbial particles. The particle tte is variously called
a “quotative particle,” a “definition particle” (Kaiser et al., 2001)
or a “complementizer” (Matsumoto, 1998). Depending on the
particular usage, it has been described as being equivalent to other
forms such as to, to iu, to iu no, or to iu no wa (see Kaiser et al.,
2001).
In a well-known work, Kuno (1973, pp. 44–49) posits two
types of wa: the “thematic” and “contrastive” wa. This position
is contested by Shibatani, who argues that both functions can be
subsumed under the rubric of the contrastive wa, but that the
contrast “only becomes apparent when a parallel or contrasting
proposition exists overtly or covertly” within the discourse
environment (Shibatani, 1990, p. 265). Others like Martin (1987,
pp. 60–65) and Kaiser et al. (2001) enumerate multiple usages
for the particle, while noting that one such usage is to mark
contrasts. For instance, according to Kaiser et al. (2001, p. 582),
when a comment is made on a nominal (phrase) marked with wa,
it “implies that the comment may not apply to other” nominal

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 92

Tanaka

(phrases). This raises the issue of specifying the kinds of “other
nominals” that the comment would be inapplicable to. Another
frequently reported feature of wa is that its usage and that
of the particle mo are “mutually exclusive” (Takeuchi, 1999, p.
133). While wa is purported to have the general characteristic of
“excluding” the nominal phrase that it marks, mo is described as
“inclusive” and is translated as “too” or “also” (Kaiser et al., 2001,
p. 242).
Maruyama (2003) addresses some of the issues indicated
above by examining the function of wa in naturally occurring
conversation, focusing on the importance of the discourse
context in which wa occurs. She reports that a majority of cases
of wa in her data fall into two main types of schemata, both of
which mark a contrast (an opposite or parallel relationship) in
some way: in the first type, given a component Y which contains
a wa-marked nominal, attention on the discourse context prior to
Y yields components X which stand in a semantically contrastive
relation to Y; as for the second type, likewise given a component
Y containing a wa-marked nominal, the discourse context prior
to Y will contain a Set X comprising various components from
which the component Y is specifically being singled out. With
respect to the latter type, she notes that although X and Y do
not stand in semantically contrastive relation, “wa in this schema
still marks a contrast, for when Y is chosen out of the Set X by a
speaker, Set X and Y are in a contrastive relationship in the sense
that only Y is chosen” (Maruyama, 2003, p. 268). It is becoming
common in recent commentaries on wa to incorporate the
concept of “sets” within the explanatory apparatus, as exemplified
by Shoichi Iwasaki’s characterization of the contrastive function
of wa to mark a referent to “represent an entity that is set off
against another entity of the same class. . . due to their different
attributes, which nonetheless constitute a coherent set” (Iwasaki,
2013b, p. 244).
Research in interactional linguistics is increasingly converging
on the notion that postpositional particles primarily have a
pragmatic rather than a grammatical role (e.g., Ono et al.,
2000 on ga). Following in this vein, Takagi’s (2001) study of
child-adult interaction focuses on the use of wa in question
formulations of the form “referent + wa?” (which she refers
to as “wa-ending turns”). Takagi argues that a wa-ending turn
is simultaneously deeply embedded in the particulars of the
ongoing activity while at the same time prospectively oriented by
inviting a recipient to supply a predicate that will be associated
with the referent marked by wa (Takagi, 2001, p. 187). What
is more, she contends that a wa-ending turn invariably has a
directionality (not observed with other particles such as the
nominative ga or accusative o) which propels the sequence
forward by providing a grammatical slot for recipients to offer
“what can be said about the reference,” and going beyond
simply “projecting” what should come next (Takagi, 2001, p.
187). Drawing on this and other previous studies, the present
article pays particular attention to the contingent treatment of
wa as mutually displayed by participants within the dynamic
moment-by-moment unfolding of talk. In doing so, insights
may be gained into its extensive utility for (membership)
categorization activities. It will be shown that wa and other

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

topic particles are critical resources for the performance of
rudimentary categorization operations.

Membership Categorization and Set Theory
Membership categorization (Sacks, 1972, 1986) is concerned with
practices used by participants in interaction to categorize people
and the activities they engage in. In the process, participants
display their cultural knowledge and commonsense reasoning
in understanding and classifying the social world around them.
Sacks points out that there are various membership categories
that are used in our everyday interaction—such as the set of
members of a population who are professionals. Moreover, there
are certain ways in which we associate particular categories
with others because they “go together” in some way—e.g.,
the larger class consisting of two categories, professionals and
laypersons, which we associate together because they classify
persons according to whether they have special rights to deal
with certain types of troubles or not. Sacks calls such overarching
classes “membership categorization devices” or MCDs:
By this term I shall intend: any collection of membership
categories, containing at least a category, which may be applied to
some population containing at least a member, so as to provide,
by the use of some rules of application, for the pairing of at least
a population member and a categorization device member. A
device is then a collection plus rules of application (Sacks, 1986,
p. 332).

An often cited example of a MCD is one defined along
the dimension of “stages of life.” If we denote membership
categories by using curly brackets { } and a membership
categorization device through square brackets [ ], the MCD
“stages of life” consisting of different membership categories may
be represented by [{babies}, {toddlers}, {children}, {adolescents},
{young adults}, {the middle-aged}, {the elderly}] or through
a relative measure in relation to the ego as in [{younger
persons}{older persons}]. It should be noted that these collections
are not analytical categories, but are invoked by participants
to reflect members’ knowledge as contingently formulated and
locally negotiated in interaction.
As will be discussed herein, wa (as well as other topic particles
including tte and mo) are implicated in the performance of the
most primordial of membership categorization or set-theoretic
operations (see Wlodarczyk, 2005). The data reveal that topic
particles are employed to classify all manner of things in the
physical and conceptual universe. Indeed, it has been suggested
that these resources are used “indiscriminately” whether they
apply to person, object or conceptual categories.
While people certainly differ from objects as stimuli, the
categorization rules and conceptual structures used in person and
object perception may not be fundamentally different. Moreover,
to the degree that differences do exist we can, presumably, gain
finer insight into person categorization systems by comparing
and contrasting them against this baseline of object categorization
(Cantor and Mischel, 1979, p. 8).

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 93

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

In order to make full use of prior research on membership
categorization in conversation analysis while simultaneously
drawing on notions from rudimentary set theory (e.g., Halmos,
1960), only excerpts bearing on person references and categories
will be used as examples in this article, though it can be
empirically established that much of membership categorization
is extendable and adaptable to other types of categories and
collections of categories. Thus, the term “category” will be
used interchangeably with “set,” and “membership categorization
device” as equivalent to the notion of the larger collection that
contains the categories/sets which are associated together along
some dimension.
In the half century following the inception of conversation
analysis, the insights provided in Sacks’ (1972, 1986) seminal
work on membership categorization have been further developed
by conversation analysts and ethnomethodologists (Hester and
Eglin, 1997; Egbert, 2004; Schegloff, 2007a,b; Deppermann, 2011;
Lerner et al., 2012; to name but just a few). The reader is referred
to Day (2013) for a useful summary. The journal special issue
[Discourse Studies 2012 Issue 14(3)] is a reflection of a renewed
recent interest in membership categories.
The following sections proceed step-by-step to construct
a picture of the ways in which members use wa (and
other topic particles) for performing categorization or set
theoretic operations and projecting the upcoming trajectory
of talk. A range of interactional environments in which the
situated marking of a referent with wa triggers anticipatory

Basic Categorization/Set-theoretic Actions
Performed by Topic Particles
Before narrowing the focus to the role of wa, it would be useful
to gain a sense for how members may deploy a range of topic
particles as interactional resources depending on the kind of
categorization activity to be implemented. I begin with tte as a
typical example of a topic particle that can contribute to laying
the groundwork for further categorization activities, and go on
to discuss the mutually exclusive uses of mo and wa. The particle
tte shares with other topic particles the general characteristic of
marking a referent and projecting a predicate. It will be shown
that one of the relevant activities tte may engender is to topicalize
the incumbency of a referent in some category.
The way tte operates on the parameters “referent” and
“category” is illustrated in the following excerpt taken from
a telephone conversation between fellow alumni from high
school, Ken and Mai. Ken has called Mai to tell her about a
grandiose wedding reception he attended recently in which Yoko,
a common friend of the two from high school, was the bride.
From an earlier part of the conversation, it is clear that Yoko is
a medical doctor, and that she is marrying another doctor from
the same university hospital. Immediately before the part shown,
Ken has been describing the guests attending the reception. There
is something in Ken’s telling which Mai notices as departing from
her presupposition, as indicated by her turn-initial eh! in line 1
(see Hayashi, 2009).

(2) [IMD 254] Doctors
1

Mai:

eh! .hh ano Yoko (.) tte
naika
deshoo:?
what
uhm ((name)) concerning internal.medicine COP
what! .hh uhm concerning Yoko, ((she)) is ((in)) internal medicine,
isn t ((she))?

2

Ken:

n::
mm:

3

Mai:

dan na san wa:?=
husband
as.for
what about ((her)) husband?

4

Ken:

=mmo naika
tte yutteta
yo.
also internal.medicine QUOT were.saying FP
is also ((in)) internal medicine, ((they)) were saying

5

Mai:

6

Ken:

a::u- ah!
naika
na[ n ka:.= aa:]::=
oh:: oh! same
internal.medicine COP N QP
oh
oh:: oh! so ((he)) s ((in)) the same internal medicine.=oh:::=
[
n:::::. ]
mm::::.

7

Mai: = dakara
why
=

ka:.=hee:::::.
QP
wow
wo:::::w.

completions or preemptive actions will be examined,
suggesting a close interconnection between the kinds of
categorization work that wa can perform, the nature of the prior
contextualization work, and the temporal-productional features
of talk.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Mai’s question in line 1 is tantamount to asking for
confirmation that Yoko is an incumbent of the category {doctors
of internal medicine}. The capacity of tte to invoke the relevance
of membership in a category draws in part on “the economy rule”
that “if a member uses a single category from any membership

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 94

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

categorization device, then they can be recognized to be doing
adequate reference to a person” (Sacks, 1986, p. 333).
The use of tte for assigning membership of a referent in
a category concomitantly proposes “classifying things” as a
relevant activity to be engaging in within the local context,
as demonstrated by the regularity with which such instances
either engender, or are used as a preliminary to, some main
categorization activity. Once the groundwork is established, coparticipants can exploit it as a framework to engage in further
categorization activities, by activating “the consistency rule”: “If
some population of persons is being categorized, and if a category
from some device’s collection has been used to categorize a first
member of the population, then. . . other categories of the same
collection may be used to categorize further members of the
population” (Sacks, 1986, p. 333). In the present case, line 1 sets
the stage for classifying another member, as instantiated by Mai’s
main query (line 3) to be examined closely below. Although it is
not possible to elaborate here, other topic particles such as toka
3

Mai:

4

Ken:

invoked (i.e., internal medicine) is partly indicated by the fact
that Mai does not use the equally accessible alternative question
formulation dan’na san mo? “The husband also?” [see Excerpt
(3) line 5 for an example], as well as by the way Mai subsequently
responds to Ken’s answer to the question. Further evidence of
the potential tilting toward a different category of this situated
use of wa will be examined below.
But first, we see that Ken goes on to respond that the
husband is also in internal medicine (line 4), by countering
Mai’s presupposition. In order to do this, he has been forced to
adopt a turn-beginning that avoids the particle wa, which can
be used to project possible “exclusion” of the husband from the
category {doctors of internal medicine} (line 3), and instead, to
use mo which projects “inclusion” in the same category (line 4).
By beginning with mo, Ken constructs a “postposition-initiated
utterance” (Hayashi, 2000, p. 215ff) which connects with the
same referent dan’na san in Mai’s query (line 3) and now marks
it with mo (line 4), thereby altering the trajectory of the turn:

dan na san wa:?=
husband
as.for
what about ((her)) husband?
=mmo
naika
tte yutteta
yo.
also
internal.medicine QUOT were.saying FP
is also ((in)) internal medicine, ((they)) were saying

The procedure results in marking
dan na san wa

not with wa but mo:
dan na san mo

(see excerpt (7) line 4) and even wa (see excerpt (8), line 6) may
likewise be used for proposing categorization as an activity to be
pursued.
Crucially, this excerpt also illustrates the mutual
incompatibility of the operations performed by wa and mo
respectively, at least in the specific context where a category (in
this case, {doctors of internal medicine}) has just been invoked.
Specifically, after receiving the sought-after confirmation that
Yoko specializes in internal medicine (line 2), Mai next proceeds
to ask about Yoko’s husband, dan’na san wa: “what about ((her))
husband?” (line 3), by using a question formulation that exploits
the projective properties of wa. As noted in Section Previous
Research on wa, this use of wa serves as “an invitation to provide
what can be said about the reference in the wa-ending turn”
(Takagi, 2001, p. 187). First, lines 1 and 3 taken together propose
that Mai knows that the husband is likewise a medical doctor
but not his specialty, since it is the specialty that is the target of
the query. Furthermore, it can be argued that the employment
of the wa-ending turn, dan’na san wa: in this specific sequential
context, namely, immediately following the invocation of a
category, exhibits Mai’s presupposition that the husband is
more likely than not to have a different specialty from that
of Yoko—i.e., that the husband is potentially a member of a
category {doctors of specialty Y} where Y is unspecified but
different from internal medicine. The possible tilting toward the
husband belonging to a different category than the one already

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

now enabling Ken to project with “consistency” that the
husband’s specialty is the same as Yoko’s. That Mai may have
not even contemplated such a “coincidence” (when she initiated
her enquiry through the use of wa in line 3) is displayed in
her uptake in lines 5 and 7: through the repeated deployment
of aa “oh” to index a “change of state” (Heritage, 1984) from
not knowing to being informed; through commentary attributing
the “change of state” to the revelation that the husband is
likewise in internal medicine; and finally, through the interjection
hee “wow,” proposing that Ken’s informing has resolved some
incongruity that had been puzzling her in line 1 (see Tanaka,
2013). These observations reinforce the possibility that a question
formulation x wa? immediately following an invocation of a
category Y may contingently be tilted toward an answer that
excludes x from the category Y, although further work is needed
to explore its workings in other local contexts.
Thus, in terms of categorization activities, lines 3 and 4
exemplify three basic operations performed by wa and mo. First,
by deploying wa to mark the referent dan’na san “husband,”
Mai potentially excludes the referent from the already invoked
category {doctors of internal medicine} and suggests that the
husband may belong to a different, though unspecified category
{doctors of specialty Y} which Ken is invited to name. Second,
Mai’s deployment of wa additionally invokes an overarching
membership categorization device “types of medical doctors” in
which the respective categories to which Yoko and her husband

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 95

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

may belong to are co-class members, through an application
Using wa-ending question formulations, Y begins by asking
of the “consistency rule.” Third, whereas Mai’s turn (line 3)
whether her father, mother and brother are going on the visit.
potentially places the husband outside the category {doctors of
Once it is established that all other members of her immediate
internal medicine}, Ken returns the husband in the category
family will participate (i.e., members of the category {those going
{doctors of internal medicine}. The entire process is schematized
on the visit}), Y then switches to the use of mo (line 5) to
in Figure 2.
enquire about herself, displaying a “reasonable” assumption of
As a further demonstration of the differential usages of wa and
the likelihood of herself being included in the said category. In
mo and the possible tilting of a wa-ending question formulation
the absence of an immediate affirmation (line 6) however, Y
toward a category different from one that has been invoked, I
“repairs” her mo-ending question formulation, with its tilting
reanalyze Excerpt (3) from Takagi (2001), which shows a very
toward “inclusion,” to the wa-ending (line 7), which divests the
young child Y (2 years and 4 months) switching between wa
question of such an assumption and is tilted instead toward
and mo to index her evolving expectations as to who (among the
the co-class category {those who are not going on the visit}.
It nevertheless emerges (line 8) that Y was justified after all in
people present in the room) may be participating in a planned
visit to her grandparents’ house in a few days time—i.e., inclusion
assuming inclusion in the former category (line 8). Interestingly,
Y avoids using mo when next enquiring about the researcher
or exclusion from the category {people who are going on the
visit}. The little girl is asking her mother M as to who will be going
(line 10), thereby exhibiting her assumption that the researcher
is unlikely to participate in the family visit. The child appears
on the outing. Jun-kun is her brother (5 years and 2 months). In
line 10, the child is referring to the researcher (a stranger) who
to be using mo and wa to display her differential predictions
(and deductive processes) with regard to probable inclusion or
is visiting for the purpose of making recordings of the family
exclusion: mo to index an expectation for a referent to be included
interaction. Note that –kun and –chan are informal name suffixes
in the previously invoked category, and wa for the converse (i.e.,
commonly used when addressing or referring to someone (or
inclusion in the co-class category).
oneself in the case of a small child).
(3) Yacchan (from Takagi, 2001, pp. 158–159; modified translation)
1

Y:

papa wa::
mama wa::?
Daddy as.for Mommy as.for
s Daddy ((going))? is Mommy ((going))?

2

M:

papa mo mama mo iku yo:
daddy too mommy too go FP
both Daddy and Mommy are going

3

Y:

Jun
kun wa?
((name)) SFX as.for
what about Jun-kun?

4

M:

Jun
kun mo
iku yo:
((name)) SFX also go FP
Jun-kun is also going.

5

Y:

Ya
cchan
((name)) SFX

6

M:

mhhhhhhhh

7

Y:

Ya
cchan wa?
((name)) SFX
as.for
about Yacchan?

8

M:

Ya
cchan
((name)) SFX

9
10

mo? ((asking about herself))
also

mo
iku yo.
also go FP
.

(1.5)
Y:

kore: kono hito
wa? ((referring to the researcher))
this this person as.for

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 96

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

FIGURE 2 | Excerpt (2): In enquiring about the husband’s
specialty, Mai marks “the husband” with wa, which has a
tilting toward exclusion from {doctors of internal medicine}
and toward inclusion in {doctors of specialty Y}, where Y is
unspecified (left). Ken responds by marking “the husband” with

Another excerpt is considered to provide a recipient’s
perspective on the possibility that a question formulation x
wa? (immediately following the invocation of some category or

mo to place him back in {doctors of internal medicine} (right).
MCD = “types of medical doctors” = [{doctors of internal
medicine}, {doctors of specialty Y }, {doctors of specialty X},...],
where Y and X are unspecified. Only three of the many possible
specialties have been represented in the figure.

formulation x wa? Four male university students have been asked
to talk about their preferences in women. The discussion has
digressed from desirable character traits to physical attributes:

(4) [Sakura 13] Kindness
1

K:

ashiha
to muneha
da na.
legs.camp and bosoms.camp COP FP
i
the legs camp ((for H)) and the bosoms camp ((for me))

2

G:

jaa ore shiriha
de.
then I
bums.camp INS
((go)) for the bums

3

K:

J wa?
J as.for
J, what about ((you))?

4

J:

5

nani nokotton no, [ato. heh heh heh heh
what remaining QP
else
hat else is there left
All:
[((laughter))

6

K:

7

J:

8

yasashisa de.
kindness INS
ow about going)) for

[yasashisa de. ((nod)) ...
kindness INS
)) for
((I
All: [((laughter))

categories) may contain an implicit tilting toward the category
incumbency of x in a different co-class category of the ones
already invoked. In excerpt (4), a participant makes explicit his
interpretation of the categorization implications of a question

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

K’s turn in line 1, in effect, assigns H and himself respectively
to the categories “legs camp” and “bosoms camp,” in the MCD
of men categorized according to their (anatomical) preferences.
G follows suit in line 2, putting himself in the “bums camp,”

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 97

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

using the connective jaa “then” to indicate that he has limited
his choice to a not-yet-selected camp. K then turns to J through
the question formulation J wa? (line 3). Interestingly, J responds
with a playful counter-question “what else is there left?” (line 4),
thereby exhibiting an interpretation of the question formulation
J wa? as embodying an implicit expectation to select a camp
(category) not claimed by the others—namely, a co-class category
in the same MCD.
In (5), wa is mobilized in a similar interactional environment,
but in this case, for implementing and confirming an
understanding check. Importantly, the excerpt exemplifies
the interlocutors concurring (through co-constructions) on
the action potentially being projected by wa in the immediate
aftermath of the invocation of a category, thereby making evident
an implicit tilting of the employment of wa toward exclusion
of the referent it marks from an already invoked category. W
and her fiancée H are arranging the logistics of their wedding
reception, guided by S, their wedding planner. S has told W and
H that it is more customary to provide a single take-home gift
for guests who are a married couple rather than separate gifts.
To this, W has just mentioned that she knows of cases whereby
wives receive alternative gifts. In line 1, she is asking about such
gifts.

S affirms this through a co-construction (line 3). Then, in lines
4 and 6, deploying the reference formulation okusama wa:, W
embarks on a further understanding check as to whether the wife
tends to get nothing—namely, that the wife may belong to the
co-class category {guests receiving no take-home gifts}. In lines 5
and 7–8, S affirms W’s understanding again by co-constructing
W’s turn. A closer inspection of the intricate, moment-bymoment coordination of action here affords a rare opportunity
to witness the action-projection-capacity of wa being ratified and
jointly mobilized for implementing the categorization activity of
exclusion from an already invoked category. First, on hearing W’s
talk okusama wa: (line 4), S quickly echoes simply the wa (line
5), thereby endorsing and herself re-mobilizing its capacity for
projecting the trajectory of the ongoing turn. W, for her part,
treats S’s echoing of wa as a go-ahead to render explicit what
wa is being used to project (line 6), duly ratified by S (lines 7–
8). In other words, the speakers are collaboratively displaying
and implementing their shared understanding of the use of wa
for excluding a referent from the category which was invoked
immediately beforehand.
This section has demonstrated members’ orientations to tte
as a resource to invoke a category, and the mutual exclusivity
of wa and mo depending on the type of categorization activity

(5) Wedding planning
1

W:

2

3

S:

4

W:

5

S:

6

W:

7

S:

8

sooyuu
no w- wa
those.kinds GEN
TOP
((do you mean that)) as for those kinds of things ((i.e., the
alternative gifts)),
zenbu:
danna san no hoo ni tsuke[te:
everything husband
GEN side LOC attach.and
everything would go to the husband, and
[tsukete:
attach.and
would go to, and
okusama wa:[
wife
as.for
s for
[wa ((glottal stop))
as.for
as for
nashi [toka.
nothing e.g.
((for her to get))
[tokuni
nashi
tte yuu no ga
in.particular nothing QUOT say N SUB
((for her to get)) nothing in particular,
ooi
desu keredomo:
often COP CONJ
common

In lines 1–2, W first checks if S is implying that such alternative
gifts should likewise all go to the husband—i.e., that the husband
belongs to the category {guests receiving all the take-home gifts}.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

being proposed. In brief, wa is contingently used to exclude
a referent from a previously invoked category (which thereby
makes relevant a different category in a MCD), and to assign it

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 98

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

to a co-class category within that MCD. On the other hand, mo is
used to mark a referent and to include it in a category which has
already been invoked.

Wa for Triggering Anticipatory Completions
and Preemptive Actions
Observations were made above concerning the types of
categorization activities that may be performed through a
number of topic particles. Among other things, it was shown that
the use of tte for explicit invocation of a category and a MCD
is one way of providing a foundation, which participants may
build on to perform further categorization work such as exclusion
or inclusion of other members of the population from the said
category. Needless to say, employing tte is not the sole way
to realize such prior contextualizing work. The instances to be
considered show that critical groundwork may be laid in a variety
of other ways through participants’ coordinated mobilization of
resources that emerge contingently within the unfolding of talk.
The aim here is to explore how such preliminary activities can
give rise to an interactional environment ripe for the situated
(6)

-

deployment of wa that activates anticipatory completions and
preemptive actions.
In contrast to the verbally explicit invocation of a category,
for instance in excerpt (2) above, excerpt (6) below exemplifies
how precursory categorization work may be initiated through
visual conduct even when no category is named, and spark off
further categorization activities. Moreover, it provides additional
empirical support for the mutually exclusive operations of wa and
mo. Recall that in excerpt (2), mo was used in order to include a
referent in a category that had already been invoked, to reverse
an apparent presupposition about category non-incumbency
suggested by wa. The converse is demonstrated here: namely,
how mo may be replaced by wa in order to repair a presumption
about category incumbency displayed through mo.
Chie has been engaging in a telling about a recent holiday at a
Hawaiian theme park, which Mari has no knowledge of. Shortly
before the extract, Chie has begun to describe the Hawaiian
shows that were featured. In the part shown, Mari is prompting
Chie to elaborate. Included in the transcript are descriptions of
some visual conduct critical for understanding the categorization
activities the participants implement.

Hawaiian show

1

no hito |ga,
Mari: ja
utsukushii
then beautiful women
SUB
so were there beautiful women who
((marked as grammatical subject))
|((lifts up hands))

2

3

Chie: so o rai[toappu |sareteru shi:, (.)
yeah light.up
PASS
CONJ
yeah, were illuminated by
spotlights and (.)
|((lifts up arms))
Mari:
[koo,

4

Chie:

5

Mari:

6

Mari:

7

Chie: =un soo ano
mm yeah uhm
mm yeah uhm

|koo
[yatteru wake yo.
like.this doing
FP
FP
going like this.
|((enacting arm motions of hula dance))
[ he
wo::w
<de otoko no hito mo:=
and men
also
and were there also men who

visual invocation of the category
{hula dancers} to which “the
beautiful women” belong

M enquires about men using mo, with
the implication that men may also be
members of the category {hula
dancers}.

a- o toko no hito wa
|ne:,
oh- the.men
as.for FP
oh- as for the men,
|((looks up toward
ceiling))

C excludes men from the category {hula dancers}; with
wa, C sets in motion a search procedure for an
appropriate MCD which has {hula dancers} as a category.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 99

Tanaka

8

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

Mari: [nanka hi: nanka [tsukechattari >
<
like fire like
lighting
like like.this doing
FP
were ((they))like lighting the fire, like going sort of like this?
Chie: [a- ha: >(
) [a- hi: nanka tsukechatteru no.<
oh DF
oh- fire like lighting
FP
oh- ha: >(
) [oh-

9

line 8: M includes men in co-class category
{fire-lighters} and simultaneously defines a new MCD:
“
”

In line 1 Mari encourages elaboration by enquiring about the
beautiful women, with a turn-beginning of the form “referent
(the beautiful women) + particle ga.” As Ono et al. (2000)
have shown, ga is regularly used to foreshadow a forthcoming
description of the state of a referent. This prompts Chie to
provide a description: “yeah, were illuminated by spotlights and
(.) going like this.” (lines 2 and 4), portraying their state by
enacting the arm motions of hula dance. In other words, through
mobilization of grammar and visual conduct, Mari and Chie are
characterizing “the beautiful women” as {hula dancers}.
Mari next proceeds to enquire about the men, marking a
new reference formulation otoko no hito mo “the men” with the
particle mo, which can potentially be heard as enquiring if the
men were also doing hula dance—tantamount to including the
men in the just invoked category {hula dancers}. That Chie finds
the use of mo problematic here is revealed by what happens next
(line 7). After embarking on what sounds like an agreement,
Chie stops mid-turn and produces a “change-of-state” token,
(Heritage, 1984), ↑a- “oh-,” which may be used to initiate repair
(Schegloff, 1992, p. 1305). She then continues by replacing Mari’s
use of mo with wa:
6

Mari: [<de otoko no hito mo:=
and men
also
and were there also men who

7

Chie: =un soo ano a- o toko no hito wa
|ne:,
mm yeah uhm oh- the.men
as.for FP
mm yeah uhm oh- as for the men,
|((looks up toward
ceiling))

How this replacement is treated by Mari can be observed
in the overlap that ensues (lines 8 and 9). First, on the basis
of Chie’s now revised marking of “the men” with wa, and
without the benefit of hearing how Chie’s turn develops, Mari
embarks on an anticipatory completion to request confirmation
that the men may instead have had a different role such
as that of lighting a fire (line 8), thereby registering that
she had mistakenly assumed the men were also hula dancers:
8

9

In other words, Mari’s uptake in line 8 displays an
understanding that Chie’s marking of “the men” with wa is
projecting a turn trajectory that excludes “the men” from the
category {hula dancers}. But the wa-marked reformulation (line
7) indicates that Chie is simultaneously projecting something
more; that Mari goes on to propose that the men may be lighting
the fire attests to the fact that wa has apparently set in motion
a “search” procedure’ for a possible category—containing “the
men”—which is a co-class category of {hula dancers} in some
overarching MCD. Indeed, the anticipatory completion (line 8)
evidences that the search has yielded the category {fire-lighters}
which is a co-class category of the category {hula dancers} within
a larger MCD. Although not made explicit, Mari’s mention of
fire-lighters evokes an MCD such as “types of roles in a Hawaiian
show,” which would contain {fire-lighters} as a co-class category
of {hula dancers}. Such an understanding on the part of Mari
is ratified by Chie through the latter’s acceptance and partial
repetition of Mari’s suggestion in overlap (line 9).
An important factor enabling Mari’s anticipatory completion
in line 8 is arguably whether the amount of contextual
information accumulated up to that point has reached a

certain threshold level, thereby providing a reasonable basis for
projection. In retrospect, the participants’ collaborative work in
invoking the category {hula dancers} and including “the beautiful
women” in that category (lines 1–4) is analyzable as constituting
vital preliminary steps for eventually evoking the larger MCD—
“types of roles in a Hawaiian show.” Of course, whether an
occasion arises for such immanent MCDs to be actively invoked
is contingent on how the interaction unfolds. Here, precisely such

Mari: [nanka hi:
nanka [tsukechattari >
?<
like fire like
lighting
like like.this doing
FP
were ((they)) like lighting the fire, like going sort of like this?
Chie: [a- ha: >((
))
[a- hi: nanka tsukechatteru no.<
oh DF
oh- fire like lighting
FP
h- ha: >((
))
[oh-

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 100

Tanaka

FIGURE 3 | Excerpt (6): Mari marks “the men” with mo to
enquire if they belong to {hula dancers} (left); subsequently,
Chie’s marking of “the men” with wa prompts Mari to exclude
them from {hula dancers} and to reassign them instead to

an occasion is presented through Mari’s further categorization
activity to attempt to classify “the men” (line 6), taken even
further by Chie’s projected reclassification (line 7), synergistically
thrusting the immanent MCD into the scope of interactional
relevance. Figure 3 represents the reclassification resulting from
Chie’s replacement of mo with wa in line 7.
A final factor contributing to the anticipatory completion are
productional features of Chie’s turn-beginning in line 7. Chie
displays an attempt to search for a description of {the men}
at the end of line 7 partly through her upward glance toward
the ceiling suggestive of a word-search, as well as the soundstretch on the final particle ne which can be heard as a move to
gain time. Such disruptions in progressivity provide “unprojected
opportunities” for Mari to implement an anticipatory completion
(see Lerner, 1996), but may have simultaneously given Mari just
enough time to execute the cognitive operations made relevant
by Chie’s production of wa.
Incidentally, the fact that Chie targeted the particle mo
(projecting “sameness”) in line 6 for replacement with the particle
wa (projecting a “contrast”) in order to repair Mari’s original
suggestion that the men may also be engaging in hula dance,
bears witness to Chie’s understanding of the “inappropriateness”
of using mo when talking about a referent otoko no hito
“the men” supposedly not belonging to a previously invoked
category {hula dancers}. To rearticulate, wa was used not only
to exclude “the men” from the category {hula dancers} but
also to enable the inclusion of “the men” in another category,
which is a co-class category of the overarching MCD “types
of roles in a Hawaiian show,” within the complement of the
category {hula dancers}. This instance contributes toward further
buttressing the potentially mutually exclusive nature of the

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

{fire-lighters} (right). MCD on right = “types of roles in a Hawaiian
show” = [{hula dancers}, {fire-lighters}, {type of role X},...], where X is
unspecified. Only three of the possible roles have been represented in
the figure.

two particles mo and wa (see Takeuchi, 1999, p. 133), and
the capacity of wa to mobilize a search procedure for an
appropriate MCD.
Consider another instance, this time of a preemptive response,
which sheds further light on the operations set in motion by wa,
the significance of prior contextualizing work, and productional
features, as well the ways in which they work in tandem to
permit coparticipants to form a basis for projecting the likely
trajectory of a wa-marked turn-beginning and to respond to it.
Furthermore, this instance will be used to demonstrate that the
process of anticipating the kind of MCD being invoked may
be vastly simplified when the wa-marked reference formulation
projects an opposite co-class category—i.e., narrowing down the
choice to just one candidate co-class category.
In this conversation [same as the one from which excerpt
(1) was taken], a group of female students at university were
asked to talk freely about their preferences regarding men.
The participants have been discussing their likes and dislikes,
exemplifying their opinions by referring to members of a popular
Japanese, all-male band, including Masa and Shun, who are
also topicalized in the excerpt itself. Shortly before the stretch
of conversation shown below, the talk had revolved around
types of eyebrows and the thicknesses of hair in men, with
F expressing a dislike for certain types of eyebrows in men.
E then commented that she was disinterested in the types of
eyebrows men have, to which L agreed. D nevertheless went on
to express her dislike for thick eyebrows, with which F agreed
by citing Masa as an example. D took this further by asserting
her aversion to men with thick hair. Then, in line 1, L playfully
objects to everyone using the band members as exemplars of
the traits.

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 101

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

(7) [Sakura 07, 262, Thick or thin features]
1

L:

2

All:

3
4

L:
D:

5

((smile voice))
zenbu XXX
ni tatoe[ru no yame te kure na:i?
all ((band)) P exemplify N stop
give.NEG
can you stop using XXX as exemplars of all ((the traits))
[(( clapping and
laughter ))
[((residual laughter))
[nanka saa nanka Masa
kun toka saa,
like
FP like ((name)) SFX e.g. FP
like you know, like Masa for instance,
you know
kao mo
koi
shi saa
face also thick CONJ FP
his face is also thick and

6

Expands description
“
”
features of Masa,
such as his face and
his hair.

nanka ke
toka mo
ko
soo
[jan?
like hair e.g. also thick seemingly FP
like his hair also seems thick
?
[a hah hah ha.

7

F:

8

E

soo na n
so COP N
t

9

D:

mayu[ge
kara shite .
eye.brows from do
his eyebrows as starters.
[he

daroo ne:?
COP
FP

one example of his thick hair, i.e.,
Masa {men with thick features}

10

F:

11

F:

eh heh heh heh heh

12

D

13

F:

nanka Shun
kun wa:: [nanka:
like ((name)) SFX as.for like
as for like Shun
like
[usu soo=
thin seemingly
((his)) seem
thin.

14

15

D:

E:

Presents Masa as an
example.

=usu soo
janai
thin seemingly COP
((his)) seem thin,
?

Marks new referent Shun
with wa, thereby putting him
in {men with thin features},
a co-class category of the
already invoked category
{men with thick features}.

Shun {men with thin features}
ratified

usui usui zettai.
a shi toka nai yo. tabun.
anmari:.
thin thin absolutely legs
e.g. NEG FP probably not.much
((his)) are thin, absolutely. as for ((his)) legs
for example, probably ((he)) hardly has any.

L’s tongue-in-cheek plea to the others (line 1) makes explicit
her judgment that the members of the band are being used
as exemplars embodying the various attributes of the target
population “eligible men.” L’s objection notwithstanding, D
proceeds (line 4) to illustrate her earlier mentioned aversion by
citing Masa as embodying thick features—thick (prominent)
face (line 5), thick hair (line 6), and thick eyebrows (line 9).
By enumerating a range of features of Masa which epitomize
the quality of “thickness,” D in effect, invokes and makes
relevant the category {men with thick features} to which Masa

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

is being assigned. Note that the referent Masa kun (line 4) is
marked with a topic particle toka used here to link Masa to
the emerging category as one out of an unspecified number of
incumbents (a usage similar to that of tte as detailed in Section
Basic Categorization/Set-theoretic Actions Performed by Topic
Particles).
Having laid the groundwork for further categorization work
by making relevant the category {men with thick features}
containing Masa, D then names another band member, Shun,
through a wa-marked reference formulation (line 12). As soon

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 102

Tanaka

as this turn-beginning nanka Shun kun wa:: “as for like Shun”
(line 12) can be heard, F enters with a preemptive response usu
soo “((his)) seem thin” (line 13), which is built on the prediction
that D is projecting exclusion of Shun from the category {men
with thick features}. F’s response is ratified by D herself through
repetition (line 14), and followed by an upgraded agreement and
further elaboration by E in line 15. Lines 13–15 exhibit three
participants’ shared understandings that Shun kun wa locally
projects a characterization of Shun as having features which are
“thin” in some sense, i.e., that Shun belongs to the category {men
with thin features}. This instance further substantiates the role
of wa to assign a referent it marks to a co-class category {men
with thin features} of an already invoked category {men with
thick features} within an overarching MCD which partitions the
universe of discourse (i.e., “eligible men” in this example).
As with the previous excerpt, the preemptive action here is
triggered and propelled by a constellation of factors. In addition
to the unprojected opportunity for turn-entry created by a
sound stretch on wa::, F’s preemptive response is facilitated
through extensive categorization activity prior to line 12, as
detailed above. The explicit inclusion of Masa in the category
{men with thick features} both prior to the beginning of the
extract and in the extract itself establishes a firm foundation
for categorizing additional members. What distinguishes this
example from excerpts (2) and (6) is that while there was a
potentially unspecified number of categories comprising the
MCDs invoked in (2) and (6), the category {men with thick
features} in the present example utilizes a binary opposition of
thick vs. thin, thereby making relevant a MCD comprising two
opposing categories and no others. Thus, the situated deployment
of wa within an interactional environment in which the category
{men with thick features} has previously been invoked serves as
a ready mechanism for invoking the one and only possible coclass category—{men with thin features}. The resultant MCD is
schematized in Figure 4.
As discussed previously, two different roles of wa have been
identified by Maruyama (2003), namely, for performing opposite

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

or parallel contrasts. It can be seen here that opposite contrast is
the only type of contrast possible when a MCD is defined with
reference to some binary opposition. Alternatively, some types of
MCDs such as “types of medical doctors” inherently have many
co-class categories, in which case, wa may trigger a selection from
among the potentially multiple parallel categories rather than just
one. In this sense, the examples inspected so far suggest that there
is a higher order of generality that subsumes both roles under a
single operation.
In extracts (6) and (7) above, a wa-marked reference
formulation triggered an anticipatory completion or preemptive
action that was quickly ratified by coparticipant(s). An inspection
of the earlier talk revealed that crucial groundwork had
already been laid through “adequate” preliminary categorization
activities, including implicit or explicit invocation of some
category and a candidate MCD. Such preparatory work was
argued to underpin the formation of an interactional context
ripe for further categorization work. It should come as no
surprise, then, that a subsequent reference formulation marked
with wa can create a fertile moment for triggering coparticipant
anticipatory completion or preemptive action. The next section
examines instances where a wa-triggered uptake is not ratified by
the speaker, and explores how such developments may be linked
to factors present in the preceding contextualization work.

Wa Used to Mobilize a “Search Procedure”
for a Potential MCD when there is
Ambiguous or Minimal Contextual
Information
In the sequences examined above, there was little apparent
contention among coparticipants with regard to the category and
MCD being locally invoked, partly owing to the unequivocal
contextualization work performed in prior talk. By way of
contrast, the first excerpt to be scrutinized here exemplifies
how a wa-marked reference formulation may make relevant

FIGURE 4 | Excerpt (7): The MCD jointly defined by participants by applying a binary opposition partitioning “eligible men” along the parameters
“thick” or “thin” features.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 103

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

multiple possibilities for MCDs due to ambiguities introduced in
the immediate interactional environment. Nevertheless, a close
tracking of the categorization work undertaken can reveal that
participants display concord with respect to the kind of cognitive
operation wa sets in motion. The final excerpt demonstrates that
wa may trigger a preemptive action even when it is preceded
by little or no preliminary categorization activity, suggesting
that participants may resort to general cultural knowledge
or “background expectancies” (Garfinkel, 1967) to furnish an
independent basis for contextualization.
The following excerpt is from the same conversation as
the one from which excerpt (6) was taken, which transpired
when Mari and her daughter visited the home of a family
friend Chie and her son Ken. Although too lengthy to
show here, the categorization work within the excerpt
can be understood against the backdrop of points raised
earlier in the conversation, as outlined below in sequence:
(8) [
1

Chie: min na
everyone

2

] Kaz
ga iyagaru tokoro o
SUB bothered manner OBJ

ya
na n
bothersome COP N

3

a. Ken has complained about having had little alternative but
to be attentive to others’ needs around the house and to be
diligent with the housework (i.e., Ken ∈ {attentive people}).
b. Ken has attributed his predicament to the fact that all the
women around him (including Chie’s close friend Kazuyo
who often comes to stay at the house) are purportedly suekko
“babies of the family,” further describing them as noonoo to
suru “carefree” or “indolent” and completely reliant on Ken to
serve them without themselves lifting a finger (i.e., Kazuyo ∈
{carefree people}).
c. Mari has commented that men must nevertheless find such
women utterly kawaii (i.e., lovable, sweet, cute, endearing,
etc.).
d. Chie then portrayed her friend Kazuyo as someone who has
little self-awareness that everyone around Kazuyo may find
her behavior bothersome (i.e., everyone around Kazuyo ∈
{people who find carefree behavior bothersome}).

miru to
see if

da yo, kitto t
tsutte
COP FP surely QUOT say

ya(h)tta (h)n(h) da(h)ke(h)do[(hoh) ne
did
N
CONJ
FP
eeing as though everyone seems bothered,
they surely must find ((your behavior)) bothersome

4

Mari:

5

Chie:

6

Mari: Kazuyo chan wa
goshujin to
ima wa
issho:
desho?=
((name)) SFX as.for husband with now as.for together COP
now together

7

Chie: =u:n.
mm

8

Chie:

9

Chie:

10

11

[n. ((sniff)) [>de
and
[a

Kazuyo
chan no goshujin wa:
((name)) SFX GEN husband as.for

ka[waii kawaii
Kazuyo chan na n da tte [iu (kara).
lovable lovable ((name)) SFX COP N COP QUOT say because
my lovable, lovable Kazuyo, ((he)) would say,
Mari:
[mamena
hito
[ha:: ::::[::
attentive person
wow
n attentive/diligent person?
w
Chie:
[de (.)

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 104

Tanaka

12

13

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

Chie: >soo ja naka ttara Kazuyo chan okorikuruu kara.<
so COP NEG if
((name)) SFX be.furious CONJ

(1.0)

14

Mari: ((lowered pitch)) ha::a .=

15

Chie: =un.

In lines 1–3, Chie uses direct reported speech to reenact
her attempt to instill in Kazuyo an awareness that everyone
must be bothered with her carefree behavior (point d. above),
using an “extreme case formulation” (Pomerantz, 1986) min’na
“everyone.” Mari then requests confirmation that Kazuyo is
“now” with her husband (line 6) (apparently based on prior
knowledge of Kazuyo’s habit of leaving home, which is explicitly
topicalized immediately following the present extract). This is
quickly affirmed by Chie (line 7). Mari’s move in line 6 can
be heard in this specific context as a preliminary to enquiring
if it is the husband who does all the housework, which would
be contrary to conventional wisdom—an interpretation borne
out by the way Mari subsequently performs an anticipatory
completion in line 10, as discussed just below. However, before
Mari has a chance to articulate the main question, Chie comes
in with a new turn-beginning: Kazuyo chan no goshujin wa: “as
for Kazuyo’s husband,” by marking “husband” with wa: (line 8).
As with excerpt (7), the sound stretch on wa not only serves as
an unprojected opportunity for co-completion but also extends
the duration of time for coparticipants to engage in the necessary
cognitive operations locally precipitated by the wa-marked
referent. Indeed, Chie and Mari almost simultaneously go on
to complete Chie’s turn-beginning. Interestingly, however, their
respective turn-continuations are indicative of the invocation of
divergent MCDs to partition the social world.
On the one hand, Chie completes her turn with an enactment
of how Kazuyo’s husband would hypothetically react: kawaii
kawaii Kazuyo chan na n ◦ da tte iu (kara).◦ “‘My lovable,
lovable Kazuyo,’ ((he)) would say.” (line 9). Given that Chie
has just claimed that everyone would be bothered (lines 1–3),
to say the husband would find Kazuyo’s behavior lovable is
to treat the husband as an exception to this rule—i.e., that
he would not find her behavior bothersome. In other words,
Chie is building on the contextualization work performed
by points c. and d. in choosing a MCD that partitions the
population into two categories, by assigning the husband to
the category {people who find carefree behavior lovable} in
the co-class category of {people who find carefree behavior
bothersome}.
On the other hand, Mari’s anticipatory completion “((he))’s an
attentive/diligent person?” to characterize the husband (line 10)
indicates that Mari has appropriated the slot made available by
Chie’s turn-beginning and pursued the main question projected
by her own preliminary query in line 6, and has accordingly
partitioned the same population differently. Mari puts the
husband in the category {attentive people} which can be seen to

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

be a co-class category of the previously invoked category {carefree
people}, thereby orienting to a characterization of the husband
which takes into account the prior contextualization work
undertaken in points a. and b. Namely, Ken’s earlier complaint
about the women around him has made immanent the category
{carefree people}, to which he has assigned Kazuyo, as well as
the co-class category {attentive people} in which he has already
included himself. Mari is now actively invoking these categories
(which has until then only been immanent) triggered by Chie’s
deployment of wa (line 8). In sum, whereas Mari is dividing up
the universe of discourse into a MCD consisting of opposing
categories of attentive vs. carefree people, Chie can be observed
to be orienting to the MCD defined by reactions to carefree
behavior—consisting of opposing categories of {people who find
carefree behavior bothersome} and {people who find carefree
behavior lovable}. In other words, the concurrent completions by
Chie and Mari in lines 9 and 10 respectively index and implement
underlying cognitive operations that divide up the population in
different ways. The categorization activities performed by Chie
and Mari are schematized in Figure 5.
The above example illustrates how prior talk can sometimes
make relevant multiple MCDs or ways of classifying the larger
population. Indeed, if potential ambiguities are introduced
by competing dimensions along which to categorize the
population in prior contextualizing work, a situated wamarked reference formulation may trigger disparate collaborative
completions representing divergent projections of possible
turn-trajectories. On a deeper level, however, the excerpt
demonstrates that the apparent differences result from the
implementation of the same basic cognitive operation mobilized
by wa on empirically different MCDs. In this sense, excerpt
(8) provides even greater warrant for the proposed operations
of wa.
Alternatively, wa is sometimes occasioned to mark a referent
in circumstances where there is minimal prior categorization
activity to form a basis for identifying an overarching MCD
being invoked. Excerpt (9) explores two further workings of
wa. First, even where there is little preliminary categorization
activity, the marking of a referent with wa may nonetheless
serve as a trigger for coparticipants to make a “reasonable” guess
of the categorization activity involved, by resorting to shared
cultural knowledge or “background expectancies” (Garfinkel,
1967). Second, by building on such a prediction, participants can
go beyond simply anticipating how a current speaker’s turn might
develop, and preemptively perform some relevant next action [as
in excerpts (1) and (7)].

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 105

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

FIGURE 5 | Excerpt (8): Different MCDs triggered by Chie’s marking of
“Kazuyo’s husband” with wa. Chie invokes the MCD partitioned by
opposing reactions to carefree behavior {people who find carefree behavior

Japan is often described as a country where there is a persistent
normative expectation to get married (to legally tie the knot)
by a certain age, even though the average age at first marriage
continues to rise (National Institute of Population and Social
Security Research, 2011, Table 1-1, p. 2). The following excerpt
from a reunion of members of a university yacht club (three

bothersome} vs. {people who find carefree behavior lovable} (left), whereas
Mari invokes the MCD defined by the binary opposition {carefree people} vs.
{attentive people} (right).

women in their late twenties) presents a vivid commentary on the
social and personal pressures that may drive one into marriage,
even in spite of oneself. Aya, who is the only one out of the three
who is already married, has just admitted to the others that her
marriage was partly a result of an unremitting buildup of pressure
making it difficult to go against the tide.

(9) [Mfriends 2685] Pressure to get married
1

Yae: nanka saikin
sa:
like recently FP
like recently, you know,

2

Rei:

3

Yae: >nanka-< so:nna yoo na (.) fun iki ga dete ki- hajime te sa:.
likethat.kind.of
mood
SUB begin.to.emerge and FP
like- that sort of mood of expectation ((e,g., pressure to marry))
has begun to emerge, and, you know,

4

Yae: hajimete
sa:.
first.time FP
for the first time, you know.

5

Rei:

6

Yae: <dakedo atashi wa
[nanka:
but
I
as.for like
but as for me, like,
Rei:
[ emukoo
ka[ra:?
what other.side from
what? from the other side
((i.e., the
side))

7

n::
mm::

a- ho:nto:?
oh- rea:lly:
oh- rea:lly:?

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 106

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

8

Aya:

9

Yae:

[mukoo
ga?
other.side SUB
the other side?
((i
side))

10
11

12

n::.
mm:
(.)

Aya: [ a- demo mawari ga min na
soo
[na no ka ne
oh- but around SUB everyone that.way COP FP QP FP
oh- but, everyone around one are all being that way, perhaps?
Yae: [nanka demo soo
iu[>soo
soo<
like but that.way say
right right
but, like, that kind>right, right<

13

mawari ga soo
dakara:.
around SUB that.way because
because everyone around one is being that way,

14

Rei:

15

Yae:

16

Rei:

n:[n
mm:
[tabun
soo iu kibun de [moriagatteru n da to
omou [no:.
probably that say mood P
worked.up
N COP QUOT think FP
((they)) are probably getting all worked up in that kind
of mood, ((I)) think.
[aaa.
[n::.
mm::
oh.

In lines 1 and 3, Yae begins a “second story” by reporting that
the pressure for her to marry has likewise gained momentum:
“like recently, you know, like- that sort of mood of expectation
((e.g., pressure to marry)) has begun to emerge, and, you know,
for the first time, you know.” Rei treats this announcement as
newsworthy in line 5 by employing a “change-of-state token” ↑a“oh-” and pursues the informing: ↑a- ho:nto:? “oh- rea:lly?” (see
Heritage, 1984). Yae then resumes her telling in line 6: dakedo
atashi wa nanka: “but as for me, like,” using the contrastive
conjunction dakedo “but,” which adumbrates a contrast, as well
as marking atashi “I” with wa. Notably, this turn-beginning
results in an immediate preemptive reaction from Rei: ↑e- mukoo
kara:? “what? from the other side?” (line 7) containing ↑e“what?” which, as noted previously, is regularly used to mark
an informing as departing from one’s expectation, supposition,
prior knowledge or other orientation (Hayashi, 2009). In other
words, without hearing how Yae’s turn develops, Rei infers from
Yae’s marking of “I” with wa (line 6) that it is “the other side”
(i.e., the partner’s side) and not Yae herself who is the source of
the pressure. Aya displays a similar understanding through her
uptake in line 8: mukoo ga? “((it))’s the other side?” (i.e., the
partner’s side).
Drawing on the discussion so far on the role of wa, the
marking of atashi “I” with wa (line 6) would be expected to trigger
a search for a category from which “I” would be excluded, by
retrospectively searching for some contextualization work in Yae’s
prior talk. In the excerpts examined previously, the marking of
a referent with wa was preceded by prior categorization activity
that participants could draw upon—such as the invoking of some

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

category and a member of the category. In contrast, there is little
if any prior categorization activity in the present excerpt, apart
from the mention of the emergence of a mood of expectation
that can potentially form the basis of defining a category such as
{people creating mood of expectation}.
In the absence of adequate contextual information, the
coparticipants appear to base their subsequent categorization
activities on background expectancies. The fact that Rei and Aya
both identify mukoo “the other side” (i.e., the partner’s side) as
the source of the pressure suggests that the search procedure may
have proceeded roughly along the following lines:
a. On reexamining Yae’s prior talk, the coparticipants locate the
category {people creating mood of expectation}, though Yae
has not specified any member of the category.
b. The appearance of dakedo “but” and the marking of “I” with
wa (line 6) can be used to exclude Yae from the category
{people creating mood of expectation}, thereby implying that
Yae ∈ {people not creating mood of expectation}.
c. The binary opposition in step b. leads to a search for
specific person(s) who may be the source of the mood in an
overarching MCD.
d. Based on background expectancies and conventional wisdom
that there are only two parties to a marriage (i.e., Yae and
her partner), the coparticipants select the MCD “parties
to a marriage” consisting of two categories {ego’s side}
and {partner’s side} which is “duplicatively organized,” i.e.,
that the set of categories define a social unit (Sacks, 1986,
p. 334).

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 107

Tanaka

e. The coparticipants appropriate the MCD identified in step
d. above, and superimpose the structure of this MCD (a
binary opposition) over the MCD identified in steps a. –
c. above in order to discover the source of the mood of
expectation. As it has already been established (in step b.
above) that Yae∈{people not creating mood of expectation},
the coparticipants arrive at the conclusion that Yae’s partner
is the source of the mood—i.e., assigns the partner to the
category {people creating mood of expectation} (lines 7 and 8).
f. Consequently, all responsibility for exerting the pressure to
marry is attributed to Yae’s partner.
It appears that the coparticipants have not only anticipated
the trajectory of Yae’s turn-beginning in line 6, but have
implicitly built on it to initiate their preemptive reactions in
lines 7–8.
There is, nevertheless, little guarantee that a “search” will
necessarily be endorsed by the original speaker, and “(o)f course,
using that procedure for finding the category, you may never
come across occasions for seeing that it’s ‘incorrect”’ (Sacks,
1992, Vol. I, p. 337). However, in excerpt (9) an occasion to
(in)validate the coparticipants’ choice of MCD is afforded. But
first, it should be noted that the reactions of Rei and Aya in
lines 7–8 contain a potentially problematic inference that the
partner may be pressuring Yae to get married against her will.
Perhaps in order to counter such an inference, Yae simply proffers
a minimal acknowledgement (line 9) followed by a micro-pause
(line 10), hearable as implicating some interactional trouble.
Indeed, just as Yae begins in line 12 to produce a potential
disagreement using the connective demo “but” (Mori, 1999), Aya
simultaneously comes in (line 11) to treat the minimal response
as pointing to a problem with the presumptive inferences drawn
earlier by Rei and herself in lines 7 and 8 respectively. In
other words, Aya locates the problem as one involving a failed
search for an appropriate MCD in the previous turns, i.e., the
invocation of the device, “parties to a marriage.” This is partly
evidenced by Aya’s modified formulation in line 11, which is
a renewed attempt at searching for another, more “suitable”
MCD: she begins with a change-of-state token ↑a- “oh-” followed
by the activation of an alternative MCD, “everyone around
one.” Whereas the previous MCD “parties to a marriage” was
sharply defined through a binary opposition, the new MCD
is diffuse and blurs the earlier distinction between the two
parties to marriage—for instance, whether it includes just the
couple, their immediate family members, a still wider circle of
relatives, friends and acquaintances of the families, or for that
matter, even shading into the amorphous notion of seken “society
at large.”
One consequence of invoking this new device is to drain away
some of the responsibility for creating the mood of expectation
from the partner, and to redistribute it among a broader and
fuzzier collection of people. The revised MCD (and the resultant
redistribution of responsibility) is now ratified enthusiastically
by Yae herself: >soo soo< mawari ga soo dakara:. tabun soo iu
kibun de moriagatteru n da to omou no: “>right, right< because
everyone around one is being that way, ((they)) are probably
getting all worked up in that kind of mood, ((I)) think.” (lines

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

12–13 and 15). Interestingly, Yae’s talk diffuses the source and
nature of the mood of expectation even further, and is rendered
highly tentative through expressions such as omou no “((I))
think,” tabun “probably,” and the use of anaphoric expressions soo
dakara “being that way” and soo iu kibun “that kind of mood,”
thereby articulating a sense of ambivalence about the elusive
yet pervasive societal pressure to get married. Rei also shows
recognition and acceptance of the reformulated MCD in line
16. All told, the newly defined, diffuse MCD “everyone around
one” jointly reformulated by Aya and Yae is ultimately endorsed
by all three participants. The series of categorization activities
performed in this extract is schematized in Figure 6.
To summarize, Excerpt (9) exemplifies the deployment of
wa in an interactional environment preceded by minimal
categorization work. Even in such instances, the marking of
a referent with wa may set in motion a search procedure for
a category containing the referent and an overarching MCD.
Where there is little prior categorization work to serve as a basis
for the search, participants may consult their cultural knowledge
and background expectancies as a basis for implementing the
cognitive operations of wa.

Concluding Comments
This article investigated the potential of wa to propose,
trigger, and propel anticipatory completions and preemptive
action trajectories within locally emergent frames of interaction
incorporating interlinked membership categorization activities.
The mobilization of wa is often preceded by earlier classification
activities such as assigning a member of a population to
some category. Marking a referent with tte represents a
typical method to explicitly invoke a new category while
simultaneously proposing membership of the referent in that
category. More generally, an explicit or implicit invocation
of a category and a member of the category through some
means can create an interactional environment that makes
salient extended opportunities for subsequent interlocking
categorization activities, which are regularly performed through
the differential use of mo and/or wa. Specifically, while mo is
used to include another referent in a category that has already
been invoked, the data indicate that marking a referent with wa
indexes a cognitive operation to exclude the referent from an
already invoked category and to assign it instead to a contrastive
co-class category in a relevant membership categorization device.
Detailed examination of instances where the situated marking
of a referent with wa leads to anticipatory completions and
preemptive actions yielded evidence that participants draw
on such underlying categorization operations to project the
trajectory of the turn-in-progress and to plan a relevant next
action.
The projective potential of wa has been explored in a range
of interactional contexts. First, when progressive groundwork
is laid through preliminary contextualization work, participants
can develop an increasingly firm basis on which to mobilize the
capacity of wa to pick out a co-class category from a relevant
MCD, and achieve consensus as to how to classify a wa-marked

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 108

Tanaka

FIGURE 6 | Excerpt (9): Yae’s marking of “I” with wa triggers a MCD
consisting of categories {people not creating mood of expectation}
and {people creating mood of expectation}, with Yae belonging to the
former (top left). Rei and Aya superimpose a MCD retrieved from their

referent. Further, the proffering of a wa-marked referent is
routinely accompanied by a hitch in progressivity through a
sound stretch on wa or through the use of fillers such as nanka,
extending the duration of time available for cognitive processing
as well as providing “unprojected opportunities” for entry into
the turn-space of the current speaker (see Lerner, 1996). I
have argued that the categorization operations implemented
by wa, together with preparatory contextualization work and
temporal-productional features may reach critical mass, and
trigger coparticipant anticipatory completions and preemptive
actions.
On the other hand, where potential ambiguities are
introduced through the immanence of multiple MCDs in
the immediate interactional environment, a wa-marked referent
may engender the relevance of disparate MCDs, representing
divergent ways of partitioning members of a population.
Nevertheless, inspection of the categorization operations
coparticipants perform through wa can paradoxically indicate
that they are implementing an identical cognitive operation,
albeit on different MCDs. Such instances can serve as “deviant
case analysis” to further warrant the proposed role of wa. Finally,
even in cases where no category or MCD has been explicitly

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

background expectancies in order to discover the source of the mood of
expectation to marry (top right). However, Aya and Yae reformulate the just
proposed MCD into a fuzzier MCD, thereby diffusing the source of the mood
(bottom).

invoked in prior talk, the marking of a referent with wa may
sometimes set in motion a search procedure for a possible MCD
containing a category from which the referent is excluded. When
there is only minimal contextualization work to draw on within
the immediate interactional environment, participants may
resort to cultural or background knowledge such as relevant
“standardized relational pairs” in order to presumptively identify
a likely MCD. The basic categorization operations identified in
this study are outlined as algorithms in Table 1.
The picture of wa which emerges here is as a resource
deployed to assemble together a myriad of features in
the moment-by-moment unfolding interactional environment
toward activating and projecting a specific type of categorization
activity, which can compensate for the tendency toward delayed
projectability in Japanese conversation (see Tanaka, 1999, 2000).
If one were to grant that this portrayal can serve as a realistic
model of the actual workings of wa, it should be apparent
that an enquiry that limits consideration to written or noninteractional data would be unable to capture the extent of
the complex processes it points to. The operations enabled
by wa, which have been a subject of an agelong debate in
linguistics, appear to exhibit a remarkable order of systematicity

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 109

Tanaka

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

TABLE 1 | Algorithms.
Algorithm 1

If y is a member of a population and Y is a category (or a description of a category), then
“y tte Y ”
can invoke the category Y, and propose the incumbency of y in Y (denoted y∈Y ).

Algorithm 2

For a member of a population y and a category Y, if it has been established that y∈Y, then the subsequent marking of another member of the
population x with mo
“x mo”
can assign x to the same category Y (i.e., x∈Y ).

Algorithm 3

For a member of a population y and a category Y, if it has been established that y∈Y, then the subsequent marking of another member of the
population x with wa
“x wa”
can exclude x from the category Y and simultaneously propose the existence of another category X to which x belongs, and a membership
categorization device M in which X and Y are co-class categories (i.e., X is in the complement of Y in M).

Corollary to Algorithm 3

As a special case of Algorithm 3 above, if a category Y has been defined in such a way as to set up a binary opposition, then the membership
categorization device M proposed will consist of only two categories Y and X, where X = ∼Y (i.e., X is equal to the complement of Y )

Algorithm 4

For a member of a population x, if wa has been used to mark x but no membership categorization device has been implicitly or explicitly
specified, then
“x wa”
may activate a “search procedure” to identify a membership categorization device M containing categories X and Y such that x ∈ X and Y is a
co-class category of X in M.

when investigated in situ through the lens of conversation
analysis and membership categorization/set theory. In this
regard, anticipatory completions and preemptive actions offer
an indispensable vehicle to catch such processes “in flight,”
as they provide coparticipants’ online commentary on the
cognitive processing through which an upcoming trajectory of
a turn is being projected and acted upon in the middle of the
turn. Particularly revelatory are collaborative completions where
two participants concurrently display how they are processing
and analyzing one and the same wa-marked turn-beginning
[such as excerpt (8)]. The fact that the completions occur
simultaneously is proof that their respective projections were
arrived at independently.
The capacity of “topic particles” has often been cited as a
characteristic and prominent feature of the Japanese language
to grammatically distinguish a “topic” of discourse from the
grammatical subject (see Kuno, 1973; Maynard, 1981, 1987;
Hinds et al., 1987; Shibatani, 1990; Noda, 1996; Iwasaki, 2013b),
along with some other Asian languages such as Korean and
Singaporean English (see Deterding, 2007, p. 61; Leimgruber,
2011). According to Sidnell and Enfield (2012), “some social
actions are more readily carried out, or are carried out in
specific ways, by speakers of a given language by virtue of
the lexicogrammatical properties specific to that languages” (p.
312). As a consequence, the language-specific lexicogrammatical
resources used to accomplish particular actions can introduce
“collateral effects and in this way give the action a local spin or
inflection” (Sidnell and Enfield, 2012, p. 302). The apparently
dynamic role of wa (and other “topic particles”) to project turntrajectories by implementing categorization activities invites
further investigation as a possible “collateral effect” of the
lexicogrammatical resources made available in Japanese. Though
beyond the purview of this article, a preliminary inspection
of the data suggest that participants routinely utilize topic

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

particles for various other, related classifying activities, including
negotiating modifications to the definition of a proposed
category, adding or deleting members from a category, and
mobilizing a search procedure for alternative categories and
MCDs, etc. Future cross-linguistic studies on interactional
resources used to render visible and analyzable the contingent
categorization work oriented to by participants may hopefully
serve as stimuli in the exploration of hitherto untrodden terrains
of membership categorization activities through comparison
of tools available in different languages for engaging in
the most human and universal of social actions, namely
jointly categorizing the world around us (e.g., Lévi-Strauss,
1969).

Acknowledgments
I would like to express my heartfelt appreciations to Sandy
Thompson for all the inspiration and encouragement she has
given me and for her enlightening comments on an earlier draft.
I am greatly indebted to the reviewers, Makoto Hayashi and
Emi Morita, for sharing their deep insights with me in order
to strengthen the manuscript. All imperfections that remain
are solely my responsibility. My grateful thanks also go to
Suzanne Miyata for the use of data from the Sakura corpus
(MacWhinney, 2007), as well as to Cambridge University Press
and John Benjamins Publishing Company for permissions to
adapt figures from Hayashi (2004, p. 350) and Tanaka (1999, p.
155), respectively, for use in Figure 1.

Supplementary Material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found
online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.
2015.01113

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 110

Tanaka

References
Cantor, N., and Mischel, W. (1979). “Prototypes in person perception,” in Advances
in Experimental Social Psychology Vol. 12, ed L. Berkowitz (New York, NY:
Academic Press), 3–52.
Clancy, P. A., and Downing, P. A. (1987). “The use of wa as a cohesion marker in
Japanese oral narratives,” in Perspectives in Topicalization: The Case of Japanese
Wa, eds J. Hinds, S. Maynard, and S. Iwasaki (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 3–56.
Couper-Kuhlen, E., and Ono, T. (2007). “Incrementing in conversation: a
comparison of practices in English, German and Japanese,” in Special Issue:
Turn Continuation in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, Vol. 17, eds E. CouperKuhlen and T. Ono (Pragmatics), 513–552.
Day, D. (2013). “Conversation analysis and membership categories,” in The
Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ed C. A. Chapelle (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd.), doi: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0211
Deppermann, A. (2011). Notionalization: the transformation of descriptions
into categorizations. Hum. Stud. 34, 155–181. doi: 10.1007/s10746-0119186-9
Deterding, D. (2007). Singapore English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Egbert, M. (2004). Other-initiated repair and membership categorization—
Some conversational events that trigger linguistic and regional membership
categorization. J. Pragmat. 36, 1467–1498. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2003.11.007
Ford, C. E., Fox, B. A., and Thompson, S. A. (2013). “Units and/or action
trajectories? The language of grammatical categories and the language of social
action,” in Units of Talk—Units of Action, eds B. Szczepek Reed and G. Raymond
(Amsterdam: Benjamins), 13–56.
Fox, B. A., Hayashi, M., and Jasperson, R. (1996). “Resources and repair: a crosslinguistic study of syntax and repair,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs,
E. A. Schegloff, and S. A. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
185–237.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall.
Halmos, P. R. (1960, reprinted 1974). Naïve Set Theory. New York, NY: SpringerVerlag.
Hayashi, M. (1997). “An exploration of sentence-final uses of the quotative particle
in Japanese spoken discourse,” in Japanese/Korean Linguistics Vol. 6, eds H.-M.
Sohn and J. Haig (Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information),
565–581.
Hayashi, M. (1999). Where grammar and interaction meet: a study of coparticipant completion in Japanese conversation. Hum. Stud. 22, 475–499. doi:
10.1023/A:1005492027060
Hayashi, M. (2000). Practices in Joint Utterance Construction in Japanese
Conversation. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Colorado.
Hayashi, M. (2001). “Postposition-initiated utterances in Japanese conversation:
an interactional account of a grammatical practice,” in Studies in Interactional
Linguistics, eds M. Selting and E. Couper-Kuhlen (Amsterdam: Benjamins),
317–343.
Hayashi, M. (2003). Joint Utterance Completion in Japanese Conversation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hayashi, M. (2004). Discourse within a sentence: an exploration of postpositions
in Japanese as an interactional resource. Lang. Soc. 33, 343–376. doi:
10.1017/S0047404504043027
Hayashi, M. (2009). Marking a ‘noticing of departure’ in talk: Ehprefaced turns in Japanese conversation. J. Pragmat. 41, 2100–2129. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2008.12.008
Heritage, J. (1984). “A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential
placement,” in Structures of Social Action, eds J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 299–345.
Hester, S., and Eglin, P. (eds.). (1997). Culture in Action: Studies in Membership
Categorization Analysis. Washington, DC: University Press of America.
Hinds, J., Maynard, S. K., and Iwasaki, S. (eds.). (1987). Perspectives on
Topicalization: The Case of Wa. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Iwasaki, S. (1987). “Identifiability, scope-setting, and the particle wa: a study of
Japanese spoken expository discourse,” in Perspectives in Topicalization: The
Case of Japanese Wa, eds. J. Hinds, S. Maynard, and S. Iwasaki (Amsterdam:
Benjamins), 107–141.
Iwasaki, S. (2008). Collaborative Construction of Talk in Japanese Conversation.
Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

Iwasaki, S. (2009). Initiating interactive turn spaces in Japanese conversation:
local projection and collaborative action. Dis. Proc. 46, 226–246. doi:
10.1080/01638530902728918
Iwasaki, S. (2011). “The multimodal mechanics of collaborative unit construction
in Japanese conversation,” in Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in
the Material World, eds J. Streeck, C. Goodwin, and C. LeBaron (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 106–120.
Iwasaki, S. (2013a). “Emerging units and emergent forms of participation within a
unit in Japanese interaction: local organization at a finer level of granularity,”
in Units of Talk—Units of Action, eds B. Szczepek Reed and G. Raymond
(Amsterdam: Benjamins), 243–275.
Iwasaki, S. (2013b). Japanese (Revised Edition). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kaiser, S., Ichikawa, Y., Kobayashi, N., and Yamamoto, H. (2001). Japanese: A
Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.
Kuno, S. (1973). The Structure of the Japanese Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.
Leimgruber, J. R. E. (2011). Singapore English. Lang. Linguist. Comp. 5, 47–62. doi:
10.1111/j.1749-818X.2010.00262.x
Lerner, G. (1991). On the syntax of sentences-in-progress. Lang. Soc. 20, 441–458.
doi: 10.1017/S0047404500016572
Lerner, G. (1996). “On the ‘semi-permeable’ character of grammatical units in
conversation: conditional entry into the turn space of another speaker,” in
Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S. A. Thompson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 238–276.
Lerner, G. (2004). On the place of linguistic resources in the organization of talk-ininteraction: grammar as action in prompting a speaker to elaborate. Res. Lang.
Soc. Interact. 27, 151–184. doi: 10.1207/s15327973rlsi3702_3
Lerner, G., Bolden, G. B., Hepburn, A., and Mandelbaum, J. (2012). Reference
recalibration repairs: adjusting the precision of formulations for the task at
hand. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 45, 191–212. doi: 10.1080/08351813.2012.674190
Lerner, G., and Takagi, T. (1999). On the place of linguistic resources in
the organization of talk-in-interaction: a co-investigation of English and
Japanese grammatical practices. J. Pragmat. 31, 49–75. doi: 10.1016/S03782166(98)00051-4
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). Totemism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Liddicoat, A. J. (2004). The projectability of turn constructional units
and the role of prediction in listening. Dis. Stud. 6, 449–469. doi:
10.1177/1461445604046589
MacWhinney, B. (2007). “The TalkBank Project,” in Creating and Digitizing
Language Corpora: Synchronic Databases Vol. 1, eds J. C. Beal, K. P. Corrigan,
and H. L. Moisl (Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan), 163–180.
Martin, S. E. (1987). A Reference Grammar of Japanese. Rutland, VT: Tuttle.
Maruyama, A. (2003). Japanese wa in conversational discourse: a contrast marker.
Stud. Lang. 27, 245–285. doi: 10.1075/sl.27.2.03mar
Matsumoto, Y. (1998). “The complementizer toyuu in Japanese,” in JapaneseKorean Linguistics, Vol. 7, eds. N. Akatsuka, H. Hoji, S. Iwasaki, S.-O. Sohn,
and S. Strauss (Stanford: Centre for the Study of Language and Information),
243–255.
Maynard, S. K. (1981). The given/new distinction and the analysis of
the Japanese particles -wa and -ga. Pap. Linguist. 14, 109–130. doi:
10.1080/08351818109370527
Maynard, S. K. (1987). “Thematization as a staging device in the Japanese
narrative,” in Perspectives on Topicalization: The Case of Japanese Wa, eds J.
Hinds, S. K. Maynard, and S. Iwasaki (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 57–82.
Maynard, S. K. (1993). Discourse Modality: Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the
Japanese Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Mori, J. (1999). Negotiating Agreement and Disagreement in Japanese: Connective
Expressions and Turn Construction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Morita, E. (2005). Negotiation of Contingent Talk: The Japanese Interactional
Particles Ne and Sa. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Morita, E. (2012). ‘This talk needs to be registered’: the metapragmatic meaning
of the Japanese interactional particle yo. J. Pragmat. 44, 1721–1742. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2012.07.011
Nakamura, K. (2009). Interactive Negotiation of Perspectives in Japanese: PredicateFinal Structure as a Resource to Organize Interaction. Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. (2011). Attitudes
Toward Marriage and Family among Japanese Singles (The Fourteenth National

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 111

Tanaka

Fertility Survey in 2010). Department of Population Dynamics Research.
Available online at: http://www.ipss.go.jp/index-e.asp (Accessed November 5,
2012).
Noda, H. (1996). Wa to Ga [Wa and Ga], Shin Nihon Bunpoo Sensho 1 [Selected
Works in Contemporary Japanese Grammar 1]. Tokyo: Kurosio Shuppan.
Ochs, E., Schegloff, E. A., and Thompson, S. A. (eds.). (1996). Interaction and
Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ono, T., and Suzuki, R. (1992). Word order variability in Japanese
conversation: motivations and grammaticization. Text 12, 429–445. doi:
10.1515/text.1.1992.12.3.429
Ono, T., and Thompson, S. A. (2003). Japanese (w)atashi/ore/boku ‘I’: they’re not
just pronouns. Cogn. Linguist. 14, 321–347. doi: 10.1515/cogl.2003.013
Ono, T., Thompson, S. A., and Suzuki, R. (2000). The pragmatic nature of the socalled subject marker ga in Japanese: evidence from conversation. Dis. Stud. 2,
55–84. doi: 10.1177/1461445600002001003
Pomerantz, A. (1986). Extreme case formulations: a way of legitimizing claims.
Hum. Stud. 9, 219–229. doi: 10.1007/BF00148128
Sacks, H. (1972). “An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for
doing sociology,” in Studies in Social Interaction, ed D. Sudnow (New York, NY:
The Free Press), 31–74, 430–431.
Sacks, H. (1986). “On the analyzability of stories by children,” in Directions in
Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, eds J. J. Gumperz and D.
Hymes (Oxford: Blackwell), 325–345.
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation (Volumes I and II). Oxford: Blackwell.
Schegloff, E. (1992). Repair after next turn: the last structurally provided
defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. Am. J. Sociol. 97, 1295–1345. doi:
10.1086/229903
Schegloff, E. (2007a). A tutorial on membership categorization. J. Pragmat. 39,
462–482. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2006.07.007
Schegloff, E. (2007b). Categories in action: person-reference and membership
categorization. Dis. Stud. 9, 433–461. doi: 10.1177/1461445607079162
Selting, M., and Couper-Kuhlen, E. (eds.). (2001). Studies in Interactional
Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Shibatani, M. (1990). The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Sidnell, J., and Enfield, N. J. (2012). Language diversity and social action: a third
locus of linguistic relativity. Curr. Anthropol. 53, 302–333. doi: 10.1086/665697
Suzuki, S. (1995). The functions of topic-encoding zero-marked phrases: a study of
the interaction among topic-encoding expressions in Japanese. J. Pragmat. 23,
607–626. doi: 10.1016/0378-2166(94)00050-O
Szczepek, B. (2000a). Formal Aspects of Collaborative Productions in English
Conversation. InLiSt—Interaction and Linguistic Structures No. 17.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Action-projection in Japanese conversation

Szczepek, B. (2000b). Functional Aspects of Collaborative Productions in English
Conversation. InLiSt—Interaction and Linguistic Structures No. 21.
Takagi, T. (2001). Sequence Management in Japanese Child-Adult Interactions.
Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Takeuchi, L. (1999). The Structure and History of Japanese: From Yamatokotoba to
Nihongo. London: Longman.
Tanaka, H. (1999). Turn-Taking in Japanese Conversation: A Study in Grammar and
Interaction. Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/pbns.56
Tanaka, H. (2000). Turn projection in Japanese talk-in-interaction. Res. Lang. Soc.
Interact. 33, 1–38. doi: 10.1207/S15327973RLSI3301_1
Tanaka, H. (2001a). Adverbials for turn-projection in Japanese
conversation: toward a demystification of the ‘telepathic’ mode of
communication. Lang. Soc. 30, 559–587. doi: 10.1017/S004740450
100402X
Tanaka, H. (2001b). “The implementation of possible cognitive shifts in Japanese
conversation: complementisers as pivotal devices,” in Studies in Interactional
Linguistics, eds M. Selting and E. Couper-Kuhlen (Amsterdam: Benjamins),
81–109.
Tanaka, H. (2005). Grammar and the timing of social action: word order
and preference organization in Japanese. Lang. Soc. 34, 389–430. doi:
10.1017/S0047404505050141
Tanaka, H. (2013). The Japanese response token Hee for registering
the achievement of epistemic coherence. J. Pragmat. 55, 51–67. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2013.02.003
Thompson, S. A., and Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2005). The clause as a locus of
grammar and interaction. Dis. Stud. 7, 481–505. doi: 10.1177/146144560
5054403
Tsujimura, N. (1996). An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wlodarczyk, A. (2005). “From Japanese to general linguistics: starting with the ‘wa’
and ‘ga’ particles,” in Paris Lectures on Japanese Linguistics, ed A. Wlodarczyk
(Tokyo: Kurosio Shuppan), 27–62.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Tanaka. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or
reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor
are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance
with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted
which does not comply with these terms.

August 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1113 | 112

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 12 June 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00797

Word-by-word entrainment of speech
rhythm during joint story building
Tommi Himberg *, Lotta Hirvenkari, Anne Mandel and Riitta Hari
Brain Research Unit, Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, School of Science, Aalto University, Espoo,
Finland

Edited by:
Judith Holler,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Michael Richardson,
Univeristy of Cincinnati, USA
Fred Cummins,
University College Dublin, Ireland
*Correspondence:
Tommi Himberg,
Department of Neuroscience and
Biomedical Engineering, School of
Science, Aalto University,
Puumiehenkuja 2, FI-02150, Espoo,
Finland
tommi.himberg@aalto.fi
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 04 March 2015
Accepted: 27 May 2015
Published: 12 June 2015
Citation:
Himberg T, Hirvenkari L, Mandel A and
Hari R (2015) Word-by-word
entrainment of speech rhythm during
joint story building.
Front. Psychol. 6:797.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00797

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Movements and behavior synchronize during social interaction at many levels, often
unintentionally. During smooth conversation, for example, participants adapt to each
others’ speech rates. Here we aimed to find out to which extent speakers adapt their
turn-taking rhythms during a story-building game. Nine sex-matched dyads of adults (12
males, 6 females) created two 5-min stories by contributing to them alternatingly one
word at a time. The participants were located in different rooms, with audio connection
during one story and audiovisual during the other. They were free to select the topic of the
story. Although the participants received no instructions regarding the timing of the story
building, their word rhythms were highly entrained (R = 0.70, p < 0.001) even though
the rhythms as such were unstable (R = 0.14 for pooled data). Such high entrainment
in the absence of steady word rhythm occurred in every individual story, independently
of whether the subjects were connected via audio-only or audiovisual link. The observed
entrainment was of similar strength as typical entrainment in finger-tapping tasks where
participants are specifically instructed to synchronize their behavior. Thus, speech seems
to spontaneously induce strong entrainment between the conversation partners, likely
reflecting automatic alignment of their semantic and syntactic processes.
Keywords: turn-taking, entrainment, word rhythm, mutual adaptation, speech, social interaction

Introduction
During human social interaction, body movements and behavior synchronize at many levels. This
interpersonal coordination can be intentional or unintentional, and it can take many shapes. In
conversation, participants’ utterance length, vocabulary, and information density, as well as body
posture and the use of non-verbal gestures often adapt or match (Condon and Ogston, 1967;
Kendon, 1970; Giles et al., 1991; Chartrand and Bargh, 1999; Gonzales et al., 2010). Similarly,
continuous rhythmic behaviors can entrain, or converge in phase and period (Pikovsky et al., 2001;
Clayton et al., 2004). Such an entrainment to a common rhythm can be seen in music and dance,
finger tapping, rocking in chairs or gait when walking side by side (Boker et al., 2005; Repp, 2005;
Richardson et al., 2007; Nessler and Gilliland, 2009; Himberg and Thompson, 2011). Entrainment
has positive affective consequences (Hove and Risen, 2009; Wiltermuth and Heath, 2009), and while
foregrounded in music and dance, timing and entrainment also play important roles in verbal and
non-verbal communication (Bavelas et al., 1986; Shockley et al., 2003; Cummins, 2009).
During smooth conversation, turn-taking is accurately regulated between the participants, who
thereby can avoid overlap of speech and optimize silence between the turns. To time their own
contributions correctly, the participants need to be able to predict the end of their partner’s turn.
Traditionally, turn-taking is said to be governed by a set of linguistic rules (Sacks et al., 1974),

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 797 | 113

Himberg et al.

while more contemporary theories have suggested turn-taking
to be driven by entrainment of oscillatory processes (Wilson
and Wilson, 2005), and to operate at the level of prosody
and timing, rather than linguistic units (Cowley, 1998). Turntaking is often seen as fundamental in human cognition, even
as a species-specific, evolutionary adaptation (Sidnell, 2001). The
basic mechanisms of turn-taking are thought to be universal,
although different languages somewhat vary in the optimal
duration of gaps between turns (Stivers et al., 2009).
Interpersonal entrainment is a result of continuous mutual
adaptation, as has been demonstrated in simple hand-tapping
tasks performed by two persons (Konvalinka et al., 2010) as
well as in dance (Himberg and Thompson, 2011). Such mutual
adaptation emerges in live dyadic interaction and can be observed
already in infants (Malloch and Trevarthen, 2009). For example,
when participants read texts together, their verbal outputs are
better synchronized when they are in live interaction than when
they co-read with recorded speech (Cummins, 2009). Moreover,
partners synchronize their finger-tapping better with other
humans than with non-responsive computer partners (Himberg,
2014).
Interpersonal coordination in dyads and groups can either
occur by matching behaviors, such as gestures, posture, or
vocabulary, or as continuous synchronization (Bernieri and
Rosenthal, 1991; Dale et al., 2013). Both types of coordination
occur in natural conversations, but from an experimental
perspective, both have complications. Behavior matching,
although commonly observed in many aspects of conversations
(e.g. as imitation of the other person’s actions, called “chameleon
effect” by Chartrand and Bargh, 1999), occurs intermittently,
as the interlocutors do not mirror each other’s contributions,
but rather interact in a complementary fashion (Abney et al.,
2014). Also, the time lags of matching are unpredictable, and
can be as long as minutes (Louwerse et al., 2012). Continuous
synchronization also occurs during natural conversations, for
example, the body sways of the interlocutors synchronize.
However, these movements are so small that measuring them
requires special sensors, and even then the signal is noisy and
the data analysis is complicated (Shockley et al., 2003). To
overcome these complications, we used a word game where turns
change predictably and often enough, and thus we could measure
interpersonal coordination from the speech signals.
Our aim was to experiment on interpersonal coordination
using a linguistic task, to contrast with the cognitively
less challenging finger-tapping tasks that are the traditional
approaches to studying intentional synchrony (Repp, 2005). We
aimed at a task that would feel natural and be easy to explain
to the subjects and would allow us to measure interpersonal
synchronization directly from the speech signals, rather than
relying on changes in secondary, oscillatory movements, such as
swinging a pendulum or rocking in a chair (Richardson et al.,
2005, 2007). Unlike Reich et al. (2014) who looked at pitch
synchrony between therapists and clients, we were interested in
word timing. We thus asked pairs of participants to create stories
word by word, each contributing one word at a time. Since turntaking occurred after every word, we were able to study word
timing in a relatively controlled situation. As Finnish is a highly

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Word-rhythm entrainment in dyads

inflected language, each turn consisted of a meaningful word,
rather than a preposition, article etc. that do not exist in Finnish
(see Supplementary Information 1). Our participants were seated
in separate rooms and connected via either an audiovisual link
(“video call”) or audio-only link (“telephone call”), allowing us
to analyze the relative contributions of auditory and visual cues
to speech-rhythm entrainment. The terminology and criteria
regarding synchronization and entrainment vary largely in the
literature (for a review, see Himberg, 2014, pp. 21–35), but in the
present study, by word-rhythm entrainment, we refer to phaselocking of the temporal sequences of word onset times of the two
participants.

Methods
Participants, Apparatus, Materials
We studied 18 healthy adults (12 males, 6 females; aged 21–43
years, mean ± SD 27.1 ± 0.6 years), all native Finnish speakers,
forming 9 sex-matched pairs. After the course of the study had
been explained to the subjects, they gave their written informed
consent. The study had prior approval by the Ethics Committee
of the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa.
The data were collected during a two-person magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiment, using a MEG2MEG setup
(Baess et al., 2012) but only the behavioral results will be reported
here. Participants were seated in separate rooms and, depending
on the task condition, they had either an audio-only connection
(microphones and headphones), or an audiovisual connection
where they could also see a video feed of the other participant
in natural size on a projection screen positioned 1 m in front of
them.
In our custom-made internet-based communication system,
the one-way latency is 50 ± 2 ms for audio signal and 130 ±
12 ms for video (Zhdanov et al., in press). In a pilot dyad, the
participants reported they did not notice any lags in either audio
or video transmission, and they rated the feeling of presence
of their partner at 9 on a 10-point scale. Our participants also
reported not to have detected the 80-ms asynchrony between
the audio and video inputs during normal conversation that
was also included in the setup. This feeling of real-life-like
presence of the other person is understandable because the
audio and video latencies of our system were well under the
limits for smooth conversation (100 ms for audio, 500 ms for
video; Jansen and Bulterman, 2013), and even under the limits
for more delay-sensitive tasks (60 and 140 ms; Kurita et al.,
1994). The asynchrony between the audio and video inputs was
within the 130-ms integration window within which auditory
and visual speech inputs are considered synchronous, when the
auditory input precedes the visual one (Dixon and Spitz, 1980;
Vroomen and Stekelenburg, 2011). We therefore considered the
transmission latencies of our setup to be negligible for our task,
where inter-word intervals were over 2 s.

Procedure
Participants were instructed to construct a story, contributing
one word at a time in alternating turns. They were free to select
the topic of the story, and no instructions were given regarding

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 797 | 114

Himberg et al.

the rhythm or the timing of the words. The experimenter
indicated which participant was supposed to start. The stories
were about 5 min in duration. Each dyad constructed two stories,
one in which they had only an audio connection, and another
where they also could see each other on screen. The order of
conditions was counterbalanced across dyads. Because of time
constraints, two of the nine dyads completed the task in only one
of the two conditions, leaving 16 stories to be analyzed.

Analysis
We aimed to quantify the rhythm of speech and the
interdependence of word timing both for each single individual
and between the participants of a dyad. A total of seven instances
of coughing, laughing and interruptions due to not hearing the
word were removed from the data.
In speech, the stream of stressed syllables generates the
word rhythm (Vos et al., 1995; Scott, 1998). In Finnish, word
stress occurs on the first syllable of the word (Iivonen, 1998),
and therefore we opted to use word onsets as the basis of
our word-rhythm analysis. Word onset and offset times were
defined in Matlab 7 (MathWorks) from the 48-kHz audio files
as the moments where the sound envelope exceeded the level of
background noise during silence. After the detection of the onset
and offset times, each sound was labeled manually as a word or a
non-word and then transcribed. If the actual word was preceded
by an interjection (participant saying e.g. “umm. . . fishing”), the
beginning of the interjection was selected as the onset time, as
in many cases the interjection and the word were inseparably
merged.
Four different time series were extracted from the word-onset
and -offset data (Figure 1A): inter-turn intervals (ITIs; times
between consecutive word onsets for one speaker), inter-word
intervals (IWIs; times between successive word onsets in the joint
stream), word durations (DURs), and gap durations (GAPs).
The IWI and ITI time series were converted to phase
values, and the concentrations of the resulting circular

FIGURE 1 | (A) variables extracted from the word onset-offset times; (B)
histograms of inter-turn intervals, inter-word intervals and word durations;
(C) IWI, the joint series of word timings, example data from one story;

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Word-rhythm entrainment in dyads

distributions were used as stability and entrainment measures
(see Supplementary Information 2). The stability measure
represented the “steadiness” of the consecutive IWIs or ITIs,
quantifying how similar each time interval was in relation
to the previous one: equally long intervals yielded a phase
value of zero, while deviations yielded non-zero values ranging
from 1 to 359◦ .
The entrainment measure, on the other hand, reflected the
consistency of the interrelationship between the ITIs of the two
participants. It was calculated by measuring where, within one
participant’s ITIs, the other participant’s word onsets occurred.
If Participant 1 uttered a word at exactly half way the ITI of
Participant 2, the phase value was 180◦ , with deviations from this
anti-phase state ranging theoretically from 0 to 359◦ . In practice,
however, the possible range of relative angles was somewhat
narrower (we observed it to range from 14 to 326◦ ), because
the participants needed to avoid overlaps (zero relative phase
would mean that both participants would start their words
simultaneously).
For both stability and entrainment, circular distribution
measure R (Fisher, 1993, p. 32) and mean angle θ were
calculated for each trial, as well as for all the data of the
experiment. R ranges from 0 (no stability or no entrainment)
to 1 (perfect stability or perfect entrainment), and it has
previously been used in quantifying individual timing stability
and especially synchronicity and entrainment in dyadic and
group timing (Himberg, 2006, 2014; Rankin et al., 2009; Lucas
et al., 2011).
To statistically evaluate whether the word rhythms in
trials were stable and/or entrained, we conducted V-tests and
Kuiper two-sample tests to see if the observed distributions
statistically differed from uniform distributions (Fisher, 1993;
Jammalamadaka and Sengupta, 2001). For the entrainment
measure, we compared the observed distribution with a uniform
distribution from 14 to 326◦ , corresponding to the range of phase
angles that was observed in the study.

(D) ITI, the individual series of word timings, example data from the
same story as in (C). Blue line refers to Participant 1 and red line to
Participant 2.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 797 | 115

Himberg et al.

Word-rhythm entrainment in dyads

Results

the anti-phase was also demonstrated in statistical tests, where,
in all stories, the observed distributions deviated statistically
significantly from uniform distributions (p < 0.01; Kuiper test).
In contrast, the distributions for both the individual word
timings (ITI, Figure 2) and in the joint time series of word onsets
(IWI) were uniformly spread around the circle without any clear
preference. The stability measures were very low, R = 0.14 for
ITI, and R = 0.13 for IWI.
Looking at the 16 joint time series and the 32 individual timeseries (16 stories ∗ 2 participants) separately, the stability measure
R was 0.15 ± 0.064 for the joint timings (IWIs) and 0.18 ±
0.071 for the individual timings (ITIs). V-tests confirmed that
with the exception of three cases, all individual ITI time-series
were unstable, as the distributions did not differ from uniform
distribution toward the expected mean direction of zero at p <
0.05.
The stability and entrainment scores did not differ between
the audio-only and audiovisual conditions (p = 0.39 for IWI,
p = 0.15 for ITI, and p = 0.15 for entrainment; paired two-tailed
t-tests).

General
In the 16 stories by 9 different dyads, a total of 2261 words were
uttered, on average 141.3 words per story, or 70.7 (range 43–110)
words per participant per story. Figure 1B shows the histograms
for word durations, IWIs, and ITIs. The word durations were on
average (mean ± SD) 0.69 ± 0.23 s, IWIs were 2.14 ± 1.15 s, and
ITIs were 4.29 ± 1.80 s.
Participants produced the words in a normal tempo with a
mean rate of 3.3 syllables/s, which is comparable to that of normal
spoken Finnish (Toivola et al., 2009). As expected, due to the
nature of the task, the gaps between words (on average 1.45 s)
were longer than in normal, continuous speech (0.5 s, Toivola
et al., 2009). The sentences that the participants constructed
together were syntactically coherent. Across all pairs, sentences
contained on average 9.3 ± 1.7 words (range 2–24), and a story
contained on average 14.9 ± 6.8 sentences.

Stability and Entrainment
Figures 1C,D show the ITI and IWI data from an individual
story. Both the IWIs and ITIs varied a lot from one word to
the next, often by several seconds, making word timing unstable.
However, the inter-turn intervals of the two participants (1D)
were highly correlated (for this example r = 0.72, p <
0.001) with each other, indicating high entrainment between the
participants.
The circular histograms in Figure 2 confirm this pattern
for the whole experiment, demonstrating that word rhythms
were highly entrained even though the individual and joint
timings were unstable. The distribution of the relative phase
angles (Figure 2) calculated from the ITIs has a clear preferred
direction toward 180◦ , indicating anti-phase entrainment. The
entrainment measure for the pooled data was R = 0.70, and R =
0.74 ± 0.05 for the 16 individual stories. Instead of varying evenly
within its observed range (14–326◦ ), the distribution shows a
heavy weighting to anti-phase angles, with 95% of the values
concentrated between 78 and 270◦ . This phase attraction toward

Discussion
We found that when two participants were creating stories
together, in turns, one word at a time, their word rhythms
were strongly entrained. Such a high level of entrainment was
unexpected, as the word rhythms themselves were very unstable,
and the participants were not given any instructions related
to word rhythm, tempo, or timings of their words. Previously,
entrainment of comparable strength has been observed in fingertapping tasks, where the entraining beats occur at equal intervals
and the participants are specifically asked to aim for accurate
anti-phase timing. The unexpected independence of high levels
of entrainment from a stable word-to-word rhythm is in line
with the oscillation-based theory of turn-taking (Wilson and
Wilson, 2005), which assumes that conversation participants are
entrained to a common rhythm that is established by shared
syllable timing (Street, 1984). This shared rhythm governs the

FIGURE 2 | High entrainment in the absence of stability. Circular histograms of relative phase (entrainment) and stability distributions in the whole experiment.
Red dashed lines represent uniform distributions of data and the range of observed data.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 797 | 116

Himberg et al.

Word-rhythm entrainment in dyads

participants’ “readiness” to take turns, and it helps them to
optimize turn-taking so that it does not comprise overlaps and
long silences.
Interpersonal coordination and adaptation occur in a wide
range of tasks, such as pronouncing letters of the alphabet
(Kawasaki et al., 2013) or in anti-phase finger tapping (Nowicki
et al., 2013). These rather simple tasks mainly recruit automatic
entrainment processes, whereas our task of joint story building
required advanced cognitive operations to guarantee that the
story evolved in a meaningful and smooth manner.
As an automatic and subconscious process, entrainment is
assumed to subserve communicative interaction (Gallese, 2001,
2005; Himberg, 2014), and in our task, participants needed to be
aligned at the semantic and syntactic levels, as well as the speechprocess level (Clark, 1996; Garrod and Pickering, 2004). The
high entrainment that we observed could be what allowed the
participants to reach this multi-level, multimodal coordination
(Dale et al., 2013).
In our study, stability and entrainment were statistically
similar in “telephone-like” trials (with only auditory connection
between the participants) and “video-call-like” trials (with
auditory and visual connection between the participants). This
result partly agrees with the results of a previous corpus
study of face-to-face as well as telephone dialogs, where pause
durations between participants were highly correlated in both
types of conversations, suggesting entrainment to a common
rhythm even in telephone-mediated conversations (Ten Bosch
et al., 2004). However, in the corpus study, the pauses were
longer and more variable in the face-to-face conversations.

We did not observe such differences, possibly because due to
the simultaneous MEG recording, our participants were asked
to sit still, which limited the amount and utility of gestural
communication between them. All task-critical information was
delivered through the auditory channel.
Although our participants conducted the story-building task
in a laboratory setting that restricted their body movements,
highly entrained speech rhythms emerged spontaneously in their
interaction. This mutual adaptation of speech rhythms implies
speech as a strong inducer of entrainment, even when the
participants just hear each other.

References

Cowley, S. J. (1998). Of timing, turn-taking, and conversations. J. Psycholinguist.
Res. 27, 541–571. doi: 10.1023/A:1024948912805
Cummins, F. (2009). Rhythm as entrainment: the case of synchronous speech.
J. Phon. 37, 16–28. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2008.08.003
Dale, R., Fusaroli, R., Duran, N., and Richardson, D. C. (2013). The selforganization of human interaction. Psychol. Learn. Motiv. 59, 43–95. doi:
10.1016/b978-0-12-407187-2.00002-2
Dixon, N. F., and Spitz, L. (1980). The detection of auditory visual desynchrony.
Perception 9, 719–721. doi: 10.1068/p090719
Fisher, N. (1993). Statistical Analysis of Circular Data. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gallese, V. (2001). The shared manifold hypothesis. From mirror neurons to
empathy. J. Conscious. Stud. 8, 33–50.
Gallese, V. (2005). Embodied simulation: from neurons to phenomenal experience.
Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 4, 23–48. doi: 10.1007/s11097-005-4737-z
Garrod, S., and Pickering, M. (2004). Why is conversation so easy? Trends Cogn.
Sci. 8, 8–11. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2003.10.016
Giles, H., Coupland, N., and Coupland, J. (1991). “Accommodation theory:
communication, context, and consequence,” in Contexts of Accommodation:
Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics, eds H. Giles, N. Coupland, and J.
Coupland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–68.
Gonzales, A. L., Hancock, J. T., and Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). Language style
matching as a predictor of social dynamics in small groups. Communic. Res.
37, 3–19. doi: 10.1177/0093650209351468
Himberg, T. (2006). “Co-operative tapping and collective time-keeping differences of timing accuracy in duet performance with human or computer
partner,” in Proceedings of the ICMPC 9, eds M. Baroni, A. R. Addessi, R.
Caterina, and M. Costa (Bologna), 377.
Himberg, T. (2014). Interaction in Musical Time. Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of
Music, University of Cambridge, Cambridge.

Abney, D. H., Paxton, A., Dale, R., and Kello, C. T. (2014). Complexity
matching in dyadic conversation. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 143, 2304–2318. doi:
10.1037/xge0000021
Baess, P., Zhdanov, A., Mandel, A., Parkkonen, L., Hirvenkari, L., Mäkelä,
J. P., et al. (2012). MEG dual scanning: a procedure to study real-time
auditory interaction between two persons. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 6, 83. doi:
10.3389/fnhum.2012.00083
Bavelas, J., Black, A., Lemery, C., and Mullett, J. (1986). I show how you feel:
motor mimicry as a communicative act. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 50, 322–329. doi:
10.1037/0022-3514.50.2.322
Bernieri, F. J., and Rosenthal, R. (1991). “Interpersonal coordination: behavior
matching and interactional synchrony,” in Fundamentals of Nonverbal
Behavior, eds R. S. Feldman and B. Rimé (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), 401–432.
Boker, S., Covey, E., Tiberio, S. and Deboeck, P. (2005). “Synchronization
in dancing is not winner-takes-all: Ambiguity persists in spatiotemporal
symmetry between dancers,” in Proceedings of the North American
Association for Computational, Social, and Organizational Science (Notre
Dame, IN).
Chartrand, T., and Bargh, J. (1999). The chameleon effect: the perception-behavior
link and social interactions. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 76, 893–910. doi: 10.1037/00223514.76.6.893
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clayton, M., Sager, R., and Will, U. (2004). In time with the music: The concept of
entrainment and its significance for ethnomusicology. ESEM Counterpoint 1,
1–45. Available online at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/id/eprint/2661
Condon, W., and Ogston, W. (1967). A segmentation of behavior. J. Psychiatr. Res.
5, 221–235. doi: 10.1016/0022-3956(67)90004-0

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the European Research Council
(Advanced Grant #232946 to RH), Academy of Finland grants
#131483 and #263800, Finnish Graduate School of Neuroscience,
and the Doctoral Programme Brain and Mind. We thank Pamela
Baess, Mathieu Bourguignon, Mia Illman, Veikko Jousmäki, Jyrki
Mäkelä, Jussi Nurminen, Lauri Parkkonen, Petteri Räisänen,
Ronny Schreiber, and Andrey Zhdanov for contributing to the
realization of the 2-person MEG experiments, during which these
behavioral data were collected.

Supplementary Material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found
online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.
2015.00797/abstract

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 797 | 117

Himberg et al.

Himberg, T., and Thompson, M. R. (2011). Learning and synchronising dance
movements in South African songs – cross-cultural motion-capture study.
Dance Res. 29, 305–328. doi: 10.3366/drs.2011.0022
Hove, M. J., and Risen, J. L. (2009). It’s all in the timing: interpersonal synchrony
increases affiliation. Soc. Cogn. 27, 949–960. doi: 10.1521/soco.2009.27.6.949
Iivonen, A. (1998). “Intonation in Finnish,” in Intonation Systems: A Survey of
Twenty Languages, eds D. Hirst and A. Di Cristo (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 311–327.
Jammalamadaka, S. R., and Sengupta, A. (2001). Topics in Circular Statistics, Vol.
5. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing.
Jansen, J., and Bulterman, D. C. (2013). “User-centric video delay measurements,”
in Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems
Support for Digital Audio and Video (Oslo: ACM), 37–42.
Kawasaki, M., Yamada, Y., Ushiku, Y., Miyauchi, E., and Yamaguchi, Y. (2013).
Inter-brain synchronization during coordination of speech rhythm in humanto-human social interaction. Sci. Rep. 3:1692. doi: 10.1038/srep01692
Kendon, A. (1970). Movement coordination in social interaction: some
examples described. Acta Psychol. 32, 101–125. doi: 10.1016/0001-6918(70)
90094-6
Konvalinka, I., Vuust, P., Roepstorff, A., and Frith, C. (2010). Follow you, follow
me: continuous mutual prediction and adaptation in joint tapping. Q. J. Exp.
Psychol. 63, 2220–2230. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2010.497843
Kurita, T., Lai, S., and Kitawaki, N. (1994). Effects of transmission delay
in audiovisual communication. Electron. Commun. Jpn. 77, 63–74. doi:
10.1002/ecja.4410770306
Louwerse, M. M., Dale, R., Bard, E. G., and Jeuniaux, P. (2012). Behavior matching
in multimodal communication is synchronized. Cogn. Sci. 36, 1404–1426. doi:
10.1111/j.1551-6709.2012.01269.x
Lucas, G., Clayton, M., and, Leante, L. (2011). Inter-group entrainment in AfroBrazilian congado ritual. Empir. Musicol. Rev. 6, 75–102. Available online at:
http://hdl.handle.net/1811/51203
Malloch, S., and Trevarthen, C. (2009). “Musicality: communicating the vitality
and interests of life,” in Communicative Musicality - Exploring the Basis of
Human Companionship, eds S. Malloch and C. Trevarthen (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), 1–11.
Nessler, J. A., and Gilliland, S. J. (2009). Interpersonal synchronization
during side by side treadmill walking is influenced by leg length
differential and altered sensory feedback. Hum. Mov. Sci. 28, 772–785.
doi: 10.1016/j.humov.2009.04.007
Nowicki, L., Prinz, W., Grosjean, M., Repp, B. H., and Keller, P. E. (2013). Mutual
adaptive timing in interpersonal action coordination. Psychomusicol. Music
Mind Brain 23, 6–20. doi: 10.1037/a0032039
Pikovsky, A., Rosenblum, M., and Kurths, J. (2001). Synchronization - a Universal
Concept in Non-linear Sciences (No. 12). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rankin, S. K., Large, E. W., and Fink, P. W. (2009). Fractal tempo fluctuation
and pulse prediction. Music Percept. 26 , 401–413. doi: 10.1525/mp.2009.
26.5.401
Reich, C. M., Berman, J. S., Dale, R., and Levitt, H. M. (2014). Vocal
synchrony in psychotherapy. J. Soc. Clin. Psychol. 33, 481–494. doi:
10.1521/jscp.2014.33.5.481
Repp, B. H. (2005). Sensorimotor synchronization: a review of the
tapping literature. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 12, 969–992. doi: 10.3758/BF032
06433

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Word-rhythm entrainment in dyads

Richardson, M. J., Marsh, K. L., and Schmidt, R. C. (2005). Effects of visual and
verbal interaction on unintentional interpersonal coordination. J. Exp. Psychol.
Hum. Percept. Perform. 31, 62–79. doi: 10.1037/0096-1523.31.1.62
Richardson, M., Marsh, K., Isenhower, R., Goodman, J., and Schmidt, R. (2007).
Rocking together: dynamics of intentional and unintentional interpersonal
coordination. Hum. Mov. Sci. 26, 867–891. doi: 10.1016/j.humov.2007.07.002
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 696–735. doi:
10.1353/lan.1974.0010
Scott, S. K. (1998). The point of p-centres. Psychol. Res. 61, 4–11. doi:
10.1007/PL00008162
Shockley, K., Santana, M.-V., and Fowler, C. A. (2003). Mutual interpersonal
postural constraints are involved in cooperative conversation. J. Exp. Psychol.
Hum. Percept. Perform. 29, 326–332. doi: 10.1037/0096-1523.29.2.326
Sidnell, J. (2001). Conversational turn-taking in a Caribbean English Creole. J.
Pragmatics 33, 1263–1290.
Stivers, T., Enfield, N., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci.U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Street, R. L. (1984). Speech convergence and speech evaluation in factfinding interviews. Hum. Commun. Res. 11, 139–169. doi: 10.1111/j.14682958.1984.tb00043.x
Ten Bosch, L., Oostdijk, N., and De Ruiter, J. P. (2004). “Durational aspects of turntaking in spontaneous face-to-face and telephone dialogues,” in Proceedings
of the 7th International Conference Text, Speech and Dialogue, eds P. Sojka, I.
Kopecek, and K. Pala Brno (Berlin: Springer).
Toivola, M., Lennes, M., and Aho, E. (2009). “Speech rate and pauses in non-native
Finnish,” in Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International
Speech Communication Association. (Brighton).
Vos, P. G., Mates, J., and van Kruysbergen, N. W. (1995). The perceptual
centre of a stimulus as the cue for synchronization to a metronome:
evidence from asynchronies. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 48, 1024–1040. doi:
10.1080/14640749508401427
Vroomen, J., and Stekelenburg, J. J. (2011). Perception of intersensory
synchrony in audiovisual speech: not that special. Cognition 118, 75–83. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.002
Wilson, M., and Wilson, T. (2005). An oscillator model of the timing of turntaking. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 12, 957–968. doi: 10.3758/BF03206432
Wiltermuth, S., and Heath, C. (2009). Synchrony and cooperation. Psychol. Sci. 20,
1–5. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02253.x
Zhdanov, A., Nurminen, J., Baess, P., Hirvenkari, L., Jousmäki, V., Mäkelä, J. P.,
et al. (in press). An internet-based real-time audiovisual link for dual meg
recordings. PLoS ONE.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Himberg, Hirvenkari, Mandel and Hari. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC
BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution
or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 797 | 118

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 13 May 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00509

The effects of processing and
sequence organization on the timing
of turn taking: a corpus study
Seán G. Roberts *, Francisco Torreira and Stephen C. Levinson
Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Edited by:
Manuel Carreiras,
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain,
and Language, Spain
Reviewed by:
Blair C. Armstrong,
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain,
and Language, Spain
Matthew D. Wood,
US Army Engineer Research &
Development Center, USA
*Correspondence:
Seán G. Roberts,
Language and Cognition Department,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1,
Nijmegen, 6525 XD, Netherlands
sean.roberts@mpi.nl
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 30 January 2015
Accepted: 10 April 2015
Published: 13 May 2015
Citation:
Roberts SG, Torreira F and Levinson
SC (2015) The effects of processing
and sequence organization on the
timing of turn taking: a corpus study.
Front. Psychol. 6:509.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00509

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

The timing of turn taking in conversation is extremely rapid given the cognitive demands
on speakers to comprehend, plan and execute turns in real time. Findings from
psycholinguistics predict that the timing of turn taking is influenced by demands on
processing, such as word frequency or syntactic complexity. An alternative view comes
from the field of conversation analysis, which predicts that the rules of turn-taking and
sequence organization may dictate the variation in gap durations (e.g., the functional
role of each turn in communication). In this paper, we estimate the role of these two
different kinds of factors in determining the speed of turn-taking in conversation. We
use the Switchboard corpus of English telephone conversation, already richly annotated
for syntactic structure speech act sequences, and segmental alignment. To this we add
further information including Floor Transfer Offset (the amount of time between the end
of one turn and the beginning of the next), word frequency, concreteness, and surprisal
values. We then apply a novel statistical framework (“random forests”) to show that these
two dimensions are interwoven together with indexical properties of the speakers as
explanatory factors determining the speed of response. We conclude that an explanation
of the of the timing of turn taking will require insights from both processing and sequence
organization.
Keywords: turn-taking, processing, sequence organization, frequency, concreteness, surprisal, random forests

1. Introduction
Imagine a species that squawks at conspecifics. If it only has one message type (signaling e.g.,
“Here I am”), messages will have low information value. If there is only one rule of use,
namely “one at a time,” communication will exhibit turn-taking, but not much other sequential
patterning. Marmoset communication perhaps come close to this (Takahashi et al., 2013).
Human communication differs radically on both dimensions: there is immense complexity on the
informational parameter as well as the sequential one (Levinson, 2013b). In this paper we explore
how these two parameters conspire to explain the temporal properties of human communication.
The core ecological niche for language use is in conversation: that is where language is learnt and
the bulk of it is used. A key property of conversation is that participants take turns at talking. This
is a demanding environment for language comprehension and production: So short is the average
transition between turns that participants in a conversation must often simultaneously comprehend
the current turn and plan the next turn (Levinson, 2013a). This suggests that demands on
processing such as low frequency words or turns with dense information (Piantadosi et al., 2011) or
more abstract concepts (Walker and Hulme, 1999) should influence the timing of turn transitions.

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 119

Roberts et al.

That is, the duration of gaps between turns may reflect the
amount of processing required to comprehend the previous turn
and plan the upcoming turn.
Equally, however, conversational language use is characterized
by two striking constraints. The first is a turn-taking system
which minimizes gaps and discourages overlaps (Sacks et al.,
1974); this is at least partially normative (interrupting is after
all rude). The second is the mapping of structure across turns:
a greeting is responded to with a greeting, a question (preferably)
by an answer, an offer by an acceptance or declination, and so
forth (Schegloff, 2007). This suggests that the major constraints
come from interaction in context, and that the timing of turntaking is above all sensitive to the constraints of sequence
organization (Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 2007). Studies from the
field of conversation analysis demonstrate that the timing of turn
taking may be sensitive to these constraints. Long gaps (i.e., of
more than 700 ms) between turns are generally avoided in part
because participants may be competing to take a turn at talk and
it is the first speaker who takes the floor that generally keeps
it. But in addition delayed turn transitions are interactionally
marked in some interactional sequences, especially those in
which an initial turn sets up an expectation for a specific type of
response, as in questions and answers, offers and their uptake,
requests and their compliance, etc. (see Stivers et al., 2009;
Kendrick and Torreira, 2015). Hence a long pause after a request
can be read as presaging non-compliance (Levinson, 1983). All
of this suggests that interactional constraints could be of equal
or greater importance for the timing of turn taking than simple
processing constraints. Likewise, by the rules of turn-taking,
certain types of utterances such as backchannels and repairs do
not appear to be subject to the usual turn-taking constraints (i.e.,
avoidance of overlaps and long gaps) and may appear in overlap
or be overlapped more frequently than other types of utterances
(see Levinson et al., 2015). In sum, then, turn timing is sensitive
to the normative structure of turn-taking and the sequential
structure of conversation. Participants do not seem to begin a
turn as soon as they have sufficiently processed the prior turn
and planned their own turn, but rather hold off speaking until
the other has finished their turn. For example, speakers generally
identify possible points where a turn transition would be relevant
in the interlocutor’s turn before launching articulation of their
own turn (see Levinson et al., 2015; Torreira et al., 2015; Bögels
and Torreira, in press). On the other hand, speakers may begin a
turn at talk without having fully planned their turn, by using filled
pauses (e.g., “uh,” “um”) at the beginning of their turn in order to
“buffer” their comprehension or planning (Clark and Fox Tree,
2002).
At the same time, it is unlikely that there is no relationship
between the duration of turn transitions and cognitive processing
requirements. It may simply not be possible to plan and
launch an interactionally relevant turn following an extremely
long, syntactically torturous sentence spoken extremely quickly.
Teasing these two domains apart is not easy. Regarding the
processing constraints, effects may be small and measures of such
information may be difficult to compute. Real conversations,
unlike controlled psycholinguistic experiments, are also subject
to a large amount of noise. The ideal dataset would include

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

a wide range of utterance types, but natural conversation is
inherently subject to skewed distributions. This means that
measures such as the frequency of words in a turn and the
length of a turn will often be correlated. In order to get a
reasonable sample, a large database of automatically processable
conversation is needed. Such a quantitative approach goes rather
against the tradition of work in conversation analysis, which
is largely qualitative in nature, focusing on specific phenomena
observed in close detail. However, in recent conversation analytic
work, quantitative measures have increasingly been applied to
qualitative coding (e.g., Clayman et al., 2007; Stivers et al.,
2009). For example, interesting insights on the time course
of language planning during turn-taking can be provided
by controlling the sequential interactional context and other
contextual relevant variables (e.g., several corpus studies on the
timing of turn transitions in question-answer sequences, Stivers
et al., 2009; Stivers and Enfield, 2010; Strömbergsson et al., 2013;
Torreira et al., 2015). This demonstrates that, while qualitative
analysis is often a powerful tool for explaining conversational
phenomena, it is also possible to uncover and interpret systematic
trends in a quantitative dataset provided that the researcher
exerts some degree of control over the relevant contextual
factors.
The Switchboard corpus (Godfrey et al., 1992; Calhoun et al.,
2010) strikes a reasonable balance between the requirements of
the two approaches, from theories of processing difficulty on the
one hand, and the careful coding of conversational instances on
the other. Tens of thousands of turns have been automatically
collected and segmented, as well as hand-transcribed for a range
of dialogue acts (e.g., different types of questions, statements,
backchannels) relevant to sequence organization (see below). The
aim of this paper is to assess to what extent measures of sequential
organization on the one hand and cognitive processing on the
other can explain the timing of turn taking. We use the statistical
framework of Random Forests, explained below, to compare the
importance of different variables in the distribution of transition
times between turns.
This paper asks the following basic question: does sequence
organization matter for the timing of turn taking beyond a battery
of processing variables known to affect language processing?
More precisely, do measures of sequence organization, albeit the
coarse measures that are possible to extract from large corpora,
contribute to the explanation of the timing of turn taking over
and above measures of cognitive processing?
The amount of data and the number of variables makes the
number of individual queries that can be asked of this kind
of data very large. Also, as this paper shows, many variables
are correlated, making it difficult to assess the strength of a
relationship in isolation. By answering the question above and
getting a “big picture” impression of the data, we hope to provide
a map to fruitful future research.
The next section introduces the phenomenon of turn taking
in interaction. Next, some predictions are made regarding
how various cognitive processing and sequence organization
measures should be related to the timing of turn taking. A short
introduction to random forests is given before presenting the
methods and results.

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 120

Roberts et al.

2. Turn Taking in Interaction
Conversations take place between two or more speakers who
typically take turns at talk, usually minimizing overlapping talk
(“overlaps”) and long turn transitions without talk (“gaps”). The
“floor transfer offset” (FTO) provides a way of measuring gaps
and overlaps in one single continuous variable (De Ruiter et al.,
2006; Stivers et al., 2009; Heldner and Edlund, 2010). FTO is
measured as the duration between the end of one turn and the
beginning of another turn for pairs of turns involved in a floor
transfer. FTO is negative if the turns overlap and positive if
there is a gap between them. Cross-culturally, FTOs appear to be
strikingly similar, with mean values ranging from 7 to 468 ms in
a diverse sample of 10 languages (Stivers et al., 2009) (this range
is small considering that the latency in the planning of a single
word is of the order of 600 ms, see Levelt et al., 1999).
This paper focuses on conversations between two speakers.
Throughout the paper, we will refer to “T1” as the turn prior to
a floor transfer and “T2” as the turn following the floor transfer.
We will refer to speaker A as the speaker of T1 and speaker B as
the speaker of T2. Note that, in many cases, T2 becomes T1 for
the next floor transfer in the conversation. Because of this, not all
floor transfers involve the same kind of interactional contingency
(e.g., a question and its answer vs. an answer to a question and an
unrelated statement opening a new conversational sequence).
There are some previous studies of the distribution of FTOs.
For example, Strömbergsson et al. (2013) find that FTOs for
question-answer sequences are affected by the type of question
asked, the type of response given and the topic of conversation.
For example, responses were slower to open questions than
wh-questions or polar questions. However, this study did not
consider processing factors, analyzed the effects of T1 and T2
independently and was based on linear relationships within a
restricted sequence type. Our study uses an order of magnitude
more data, a wider range of sequence types and considers
properties of both T1 and T2 together.

3. Cognitive Planning and Comprehension
Here we list some measures relevant to either production,
comprehension, or both, whose importance we can readily check
in the data to hand. We consider a number of hypotheses
about how these might play a role in response times, measured
in FTO.

3.1. Turn Length
By definition, longer turns can have longer periods of overlap
with another turn. Moreover, longer utterances are likely to
be more complex than shorter utterances, requiring more
processing. However, a longer utterance also gives more time
for a listener to begin planning her own turn. Therefore, the
predictions for effect of the length of T1 on FTO values are not
clear without taking other measures of the content of the turn
into account. On the other hand, the prediction for T2 length may
be clearer. Planning a long utterance should generally take longer
than planning a short one, so the FTO is expected to increase as
the length of T2 increases.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

3.2. Frequency
Psycholinguistic research has shown that word frequency plays
a crucial role in ease of processing, both in comprehension and
production. In lexical decision experiments for example (i.e.,
where participants must decide whether a displayed word is a real
word or not, in as short a time as possible), frequent words are
responded to more rapidly than infrequent words (Balota et al.,
2007). This predicts that turns consisting of higher frequency
words should be comprehended and produced faster, therefore
reducing the turn transitions in which they are involved.

3.3. Concreteness
Words that refer to concrete entities (e.g., “ball”) contrast with
words that refer to abstract entities (e.g., “justice”). Concreteness
ratings have been shown to correlate with lexical decision times,
with concrete words being comprehended faster (Schwanenflugel
et al., 1988). Concrete words are also more easily recalled and
produced than abstract words (Hanley et al., 2013). This predicts
that both T1 or T2 turns with many abstract words may lead to
longer gaps between them.

3.4. Surprisal
Surprisal is a measure of the amount of information a word
carries about the upcoming words in a phrase. For example,
the word “the” gives the listener little information about what
the next word might be beyond syntactic category, while the
word “helter” is almost certain to precede the word “skelter.”
Various theories of processing suggest that speakers adapt their
utterances to spread out the information in a sentence evenly
in order to robustly transmit the signal (Piantadosi et al., 2011).
In this context, the inverse of surprisal is also a measure of the
“projectability” of turns (Magyari and De Ruiter, 2012) (although
not necessarily of turn endings). Surprisal is conceptually the
same as cloze probability (i.e., the probability of experimental
participants using a word as a completion to a sentence
fragment), which is used in many experiments looking at word
processing (e.g., Kutas and Hillyard, 1984).

3.5. Syntactic Complexity
Syntactically complex utterances require more processing than
simpler ones. Syntactically complex sentences make greater
demands on working memory (Kemper and Rash, 1988) and are
harder to produce and understand (Kemper et al., 1989).
When responding to a turn, speakers must comprehend the
previous turn and plan their own turn. If speakers take longer to
comprehend turns with complex syntactic structures than turns
with simple ones, then comprehension resources may be diverted
from planning the response, making the FTO longer. At the
same time, if a speaker wants to produce a complex syntactic
structure, this could take more time to plan, also making the
FTO longer. The prediction is that FTOs become longer as the
syntactic complexity of either T1 or T2 increases.

4. Sequence Organization
Various measures of sequence organization are discussed below.

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 121

Roberts et al.

4.1. Adjacency Pairs
Some types of turn make a response relevant. For example, if
T1 includes a question, T2 is expected to provide an answer.
Answers, on the other hand, do not make the same kind of
demands on the next speaker. Therefore, it is possible to identify
turns that have initiating actions, like questions, and turns that
have responding actions, like answers. When an initiating action,
calling for a specific type of response in next turn, is followed by
a relevant responding action, the turns form an adjacency pair.
The predictions about the timing of these types of turns,
and whether they appear in a particular combination, are not
clear. On the one hand, if initiating actions can be recognized
easily, then responding actions may be produced closer to the
turn end. This may be possible through the internal design of
the turn (Drew, 2013; Levinson, 2013a), or through pre-ambles
prior to T1 such as pre-offers (e.g., “Are you doing anything
tonight?”), which set the context for initiating an offer such as
an invitation. In this case, one would expect the timing of the
question following a pre-sequence to be more tightly timed. Also,
just as lexical frequency aids processing, so frequent adjacency
pairs may be quicker to comprehend or produce. On the other
hand, responding actions must “fit” with the previous turn, which
may require more planning and therefore delay the response.
There may also be no particular requirement in terms of timing
for turns that do not form adjacency pairs.
One aspect of adjacency pairs that has been studied in
terms of timing is preference (Atkinson and Heritage, 1984).
Dispreferred responses, such as declinations to offers, invitations,
and requests, are often delayed (Kendrick and Torreira, 2015).
Delayed transitions may project the valence of the response and
so allow the speaker of T1 to begin planning the third turn
(the next T1) immediately (Levinson, 1983, 2013a; Clayman,
2002). For example, a delayed or hesitant response after an
offer may be followed by an upgraded offer. For these reasons,
although dispreferred responses themselves may be belayed,
turns following dispreferred responses may have shorter FTOs.

4.2. Response Tokens
Speakers can signal that they understand what is being said
with back-channels or response tokens (Gardner, 2001). These
include acknowledgement tokens (“yeah,” “mm”), continuers
(“mm-hm”) and news markers (“oh,” “really?,” Heritage, 1984).
While these are often produced “in the clear” they may appear in
overlap without competing for the turn. Continuers, for example,
are often overlapped by the prior speaker (Local, 1996; Levinson
et al., 2015).

4.3. Laughter
Laughter has a variety of interactional uses beyond signaling joy
or humor (Jefferson, 1984; Haakana, 2002; Glenn, 2003). The
literature on laughter in interaction demonstrates that although
laughter may occupy a turn-like slot (e.g., after a joke), laughing
(or a sequence of laughter syllables) is often not treated as
competing for the floor in the same way as an ordinary utterance
might be, but may be superimposed on it by the speaker or
be delivered in overlap by listeners (Glenn, 1989; Ford and
Thompson, 1996). The lack of turn organization is indicated

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

by the timing of laughter, which can be targeted at the content
of the turn (a “recognition point”) rather than turn boundaries
(Jefferson, 1974; Glenn, 1989). Therefore, laughter may often
occur in overlap. Furthermore, overlapping talk is common in
sequences containing laughter when humor is involved, and
is not treated as problematic by the speakers. Jefferson (1974)
identifies two types of laughter: a speaker may laugh after being
“invited” to laugh, for instance by the previous speaker laughing,
or a speaker may “volunteer” laughter unprompted. While types
of laughter are difficult to code for automatically, the turns that
include laughter can be identified in the Switchboard corpus.
There are four possible combinations: both T1 and T2 include
laughter (T1 “invites” laughter and overlap is possible); only
T2 includes laughs (“volunteered” laughter, likely to be at a
“recognition point” and therefore can occur in overlap); only T1
includes laughter (T1 “invites” laughter, but T2 does not respond,
it is likely that T2 is an ordinary turn after a gap); neither turn
includes laughter (an ordinary turn transition, therefore a gap).

5. Interactions between Processing and
Sequence Organization
Processing and sequence organization accounts make different
predictions for some variables. For example, a faster speech rate
in T1 would be predicted to lead to a longer gap due to higher
processing demands in the comprehender. In contrast, some
theories of turn-timing in Conversation Analysis see timing as
rhythmic (Couper-Kuhlen, 1993), and would predict that faster
speech rates would lead to shorter gaps.
We note that the constraints of processing and sequence
organization may not be entirely disparate mechanisms. For
example, Stivers et al. (2009) note that negative answers are
slower. This may be because the responder is treating the answer
as dispreferred (not in line with the expectation indicated by
the polarity of the question), and is therefore proferring it
reluctantly. But equally, it is well-known that negative responses
are harder to process both in comprehension and production
(Clark, 1976). In addition, frequency effects and expectability
(or its converse surprisal) may apply to both processing and
sequencing constraints. Certain types of turn project other types
of turn. Thus, a question in T1 makes it interactionally relevant
for T2 to provide an answer. Turn transitions may be shorter
between these “adjacency pairs,” since adjacency pairs are more
predictable and therefore aid comprehension and allow planning
to begin sooner. That is, frequent, predictable structures and may
aid fast transitions in the same way as frequent words do.
Speakers may overlap with an incoming turn when they wish
to signal that they recognize in advance what is about to be
said (so called “recognitional overlap,” Jefferson, 1986), and in
tokens of agreement (Stolt, 2008). While this is an observation
from the sequence organization literature, it may be measured by
surprisal: words which have a large amount of information about
the upcoming words allow prediction of the end of the turn.
If the timing of turn taking is the primary “ecology” to
which language has to adapt (Levinson, 2006), certain processing
effects may only apply after taking sequence organization
factors into account. For example, planning of T2 can often

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 122

Roberts et al.

begin when the pragmatic action of T1 can be recognised
(Levinson, 2013a). Action ascription is often independent
of syntactic structure, instead being dependent largely on
sequential context (Gisladottir et al., 2012). An additional
overlap between processing and conversational organization
is that the latter makes systematic provision for processing
problems. Thus, English makes provision for signaling a small
processing hitch (uh) vs. a larger one (um) (Clark and Fox Tree,
2002, see application to the Switchboard corpus in a post
by Liberman (2014), http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=
14991). Consequently, there may be an asymmetry in the
predictions for the syntactic complexity of A’s turn and B’s
turn. While T2 has no way of influencing the relationship
between syntactic complexity and when T1 ends (apart from
other-initiated repair), there is the option of “buffering” planning
at the beginning of T2. Speakers often use turn-preserving
placeholders, or hesitation markers, such as “uh” and “um” at the
start of their turns to minimize the gap between turns. They may
use this extra time to plan their response. This asymmetry in the
options for T2 predicts that the syntactic complexity of T2 would
only be correlated with the FTO when excluding initial parts of
T2 that were simply turn-preserving placeholders.
In summary, the timing of turn taking may be heavily context
dependent. In this case, we would not expect linear effects of
processing measures over the whole data, nor simple categorical
effects of sequence organization across the board. Instead, we
would expect some relationships to be evident only in certain
conditions. Typical regression approaches to statistical modeling
are not effective at exploring this kind of data. Because of
this we use a random forests framework, which can discover
context-dependent relationships.

6. Materials and Methods
Conversations were taken from the Switchboard corpus (Godfrey
et al., 1992), a large corpus of telephone conversations recorded
in the United States of America in the 1990s. Participants who
did not know each other were connected by an automatic
switchboard and were assigned a topic of conversation, which
was automatically recorded. The corpus has been annotated
on different levels over the years since its first release. In this
study we use several layers of annotations as compiled in the
NXT-Switchboard Corpus (Calhoun et al., 2010).These include
segmentation of phonetic segments and words in time, which
can be used to estimate the duration of turns at talk and the
floor transfer between turns. Due to a flaw in the original data
collection, the timing of part of the corpus is unreliable (see
Calhoun et al., 2010). For this reason, recordings with unreliable
timings were discarded in our study. Utterances have been
hand-annotated for dialogue acts, such as yes/no questions or
backchannels (Jurafsky et al., 1997). Words are annotated for
parts of speech and organized into syntactic trees (Marcus et al.,
1999). There is also meta-data on the speakers such as age, sex
and location in the USA. Obviously, visual cues are not present
in this dataset.
We processed the Switchboard files using specifically designed
software (Lubbers and Torreira, 2014). This extracted the FTO
between turns (Section 6.1). We categorized the dialog acts of
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

each turn into sequence organization categories and identified
turns with laughter and dispreferred responses (Sectio 6.2). For
each turn in the database, we also calculated various measures of
processing, such as frequency, surprisal, and concreteness, and
used the syntactic annotations from the Switchboard corpus to
estimate syntactic complexity (Section 6.3).

6.1. Calculating Floor Transfer Offset
The corpus provides timing segmentation of phonological
words (originally segmented by Deshmukh et al., 1998). We
approximated “turns” by “gluing” phonological words together
if they were from the same speaker and had less than 180 ms
gap between them. The floor transfer offset (FTO) or “gap” and
“overlap” duration between turns from different speakers was
calculated using the same method as in Heldner and Edlund
(2010). Transitions involving very long gaps or overlaps were
discarded from the analyses (FTOs lower than -2200 ms or above
2200 ms, less than 2% of the final data). The distribution of
FTOs fits well with distributions reported in other studies (see
Section 7).
FTOs were also re-calculated, ignoring T2 initial
turn-preserving placeholders, so that we can report FTOs with
and without initial hesitation markers. These were identified
as in Strömbergsson et al. (2013), as the tokens “uh,” “um,”
and “well.” An alternative coding was done with identification
based on the syntactic category of the initial word being an
interjection, filler or discourse marker (the category “UH” from
Calhoun et al.’s coding). We calculated the FTOs from the end
of T1 to the beginning of the first word in T2 which was not
a turn-preserving placeholder. For this set of data, T2s that
consisted of only turn-preserving placeholders were excluded.

6.2. Sequence Organization Data
The Switchboard corpus is annotated with dialog acts (Jurafsky
et al., 1997). These are similar to speech acts, but include
categories suited for spoken conversations such as backchannels.
These dialog acts were grouped into sequence types: first
pair parts, second pair parts, opening and closing sequences,
backchannels, repairs or “other” (see Table 1). For each dialog
act type, a set of dialog acts was identified which would make
a well-formed adjacency pair. For example, a yes/no question
projects a yes or no answer.
Laughter is coded in the Switchboard transcripts, sometimes
as a separate feature, and sometimes within the orthographic
transcript. Turns that included laughter were identified.
Preferred and dispreferred responses were identified with similar
criteria as in Kendrick and Torreira (2015). Transitions where T1
initiates a question were identified (with tags “open-q,” “tag-q,”
“wh-q,” “yn-q,” “yn-decl-q,” “commit”). Within these, any T2 that
included an accepting dialog act (“affirm,” “yes,” “answer”) were
marked as preferred responses, while all others were marked as
dispreferred responses. The frequency of every possible pair of
dialog acts surrounding an FTO was extracted. Obviously, the
measures above are coarse approximations of the qualitative
judgments of conversation analysts. However, they are useful
for getting a general picture of how the principles of sequence
organization could interface with principles of processing.
May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 123

Roberts et al.

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

TABLE 1 | The NXT dialog act categories and how they map onto sequence organization types.
NXT category

Description

Expected next categories

Initiating

Responding

Response token

decl-q

Declarative Wh-Question

answer,statement

Y

open

Conventional-opening

open-q

Open-Question

neg,affirm,no,yes,statement,reject

or

Or-Clause

neg,affirm,no,yes,statement,reject

repeat-q

Signal-non-understanding

sum

Summarize/Reformulate

tag-q

Tag-Question

neg,affirm,no,yes,statement,reject

Y

wh-q

Wh-Question

answer,statement,reject

Y

yn-q

Yes-No-Question

yes,no,affirm,neg,statement

Y

yn-decl-q

Declarative Yes-No-Question

yes,affirm,statement

Y

acknowledge

Response Acknowledgment

Y

Y

backchannel

Backchannel

Y

Y

backchannel-q

Backchannel as question

Y

Y

ans-dispref

Dispreferred answers

Y

Neg

hedge

Hedge

Y

Neg

maybe

Maybe/Accept-part

Y

Neg

neg

Negative non-no answers

Y

Neg

no

No answers

Y

Neg

reject

Reject

Y

Neg

affirm

Affirmative non-yes answers

Y

Pos

agree

Agree/Accept

Y

Pos

answer

Other answers

Y

Pos

yes

Yes answers

Y

Pos

apprec

Appreciation

abandon

Abandoned or Turn-Exit

apology

Apology

agree,downplay

close

Conventional-closing

close

commit

Offers, Options, and Commits

completion

Collaborative Completion

directive

Action-directive

downplay

Downplayer

excluded

Excluded - bad segmentation

hold

Hold before response

Y
Y
Y
Y
Y

accept

Y

opinion

Statement-opinion

other

Other

third-pty

3rd-party-talk

quote

Quotation

repeat

Repeat-phrase

agree

rhet-q

Rhetorical-Questions

agree

agree,opinion,disagree,accept

self-talk

Self-Talk

statement

Statement-non-opinion

statement

thank

Thanking

downplay

uninterp

Uninterpretable

6.3. Linking the Switchboard to Processing
Measures
The turns were linked to various measures of processing.
Utterance length was measured in syllables, as included
in the NXT-Switchboard corpus. We calculated speech
rate using the method from Wightman et al. (1992).
This calculates the departure from the expected duration,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Valence

calculated from the sum of mean phone durations in the
corpus.
We estimated word frequency from the Switchboard corpus
itself. The count of each word for each part of speech in the
transcript of the full corpus was taken (the same method as
Potts, 2011, except we also automatically removed tense and
number inflection from nouns and verbs in order to improve

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 124

Roberts et al.

the frequency estimates). The full Switchboard corpus includes
around 15 million tokens. For each turn, the mean frequency
of words was calculated. Larger corpora give estimations of
frequency that better predict processing measures such as lexical
decision times (e.g., the Subtlex corpus estimates, Brysbaert and
New, 2009), but estimates are also sensitive to genre, for which
the Switchboard is by definition a good match. In any case, the
source of frequency estimates did not affect the general results
(see Supplementary Materials 1).
Words from each turn were lemmatized and linked with
concreteness ratings from a large ratings study (Brysbaert et al.,
2014), matched for part of speech. A measure of surprisal was
taken from Piantadosi et al. (2011), which is based on the amount
of information a word contains about the following words in the
Google n-gram corpus of English. For each turn, we extracted the
surprisal value for each word and calculated the mean surprisal
value for the turn. In addition, we estimated the uniformity of
the information density by taking the mean deviation from the
expected uniform information density over words.
We estimated syntactic tree depth from the NXT-Switchboard
syntactic trees. The depth of a tree is the maximum number of
nodes between the root and any tip in the tree. The maximum
depth of any tree in a turn was taken as the maximum depth for
that turn. We also measured the number of clauses in each turn,
calculated as the number of “S” sentence nodes in all trees of the
turn.
Altogether 19,754 turn transitions were found for which each
of the 30 predictor measures were available. These came from
348 conversations involving 231 speakers, totaling around 31 h
of conversation. The vast majority of the conversations lasted
between four and a half and five minutes, as specified in the
instructions given to participants. Speakers produced an average
of 12 FTOs per minute.

6.4. Random Forests
This paper aims to contrast measures of processing with
measures of sequence organization in the explanation of turn
transitions. However, many of the considered variables are highly
correlated. This can invalidate the assumptions of a typical
regression approach (the estimates of individual effects are
unstable and the standard errors inflate, leading to misleading
comparisons between the strengths of individual predictors and
an under-estimation of significance of individual effects). As
reported below and in the Supplementary Materials, many of the
independent variables in the Switchboard data are correlated.
One solution to this problem is to use the method of “random
forests” (Breiman, 2001). This is an approach based on regression
(and classification), though the analyses are not linear regressions
across the whole data. Instead, a “binary decision tree” (also
called classification and regression tree or recursive partitioning,
Strobl et al., 2009) uses the predictor variables to split the data
into sub-sets. However, the structure of a decision tree is not
robust to the selection of variables or sub-sets of data. In order
to overcome this problem, many trees are run with sub-sets of
predictor variables (hence a random “forest”), then the findings
are aggregated to determine the relative importance of different
variables.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

First, the concept of a decision tree is reviewed. A decision
tree is a hierarchy of yes/no-questions that splits data into subsets. To illustrate this, consider the tree in Figure 2. This was
generated with FTO as the dependent variable and four measures
of sequence organization (whether T1 includes an initiating
action, whether T2 includes a responding action, whether T1
includes laughter and whether T2 includes laughter). For clarity,
only the first three levels are shown.
The data is divided at each node of the tree, and the leaves
of the tree show the mean FTO for that sub-set of the data in
a bar chart. Above each bar chart is a number labeled n which
represents the number of observations in that sub-set. The tree
can be read like a solution to a game of “20 questions.” If you
are asked to guess the value of an FTO, the decision tree aims
to show you the optimal sequence of yes-no questions that will
guide your guess. The tree can also be read like a set of rules that
describe patterns in the data (e.g., in Figure 1, “if the turns form
an adjacency pair, the FTO will be a short gap, unless there is
invited laughter, in which case the FTO will be in overlap.”)
The first decision is whether T1 includes an initiating action
(e.g., a question). For a given turn transition, if T1 is initiating,
then we follow the right branch. The next “question” splits the
data into T2s with responding actions (e.g., answers) and those
without. If T2 does include a responding action, we follow the
branch to the left, and are asked whether T1 included laughter.
If not, then we end up at a terminal category which we might
label “adjacency pair,” summarized in a bar chart. This bar chart
indicates that the mean FTO is around 200 ms, based on 1130
samples (agreeing well with other studies, e.g., Stivers et al., 2009).
Every turn transition can be assigned to one of the terminal
categories. For example, turn transitions where T1 is an initiating
action, but T2 is not a responding action (a kind of dispreferred
response) have a mean FTO of around 300 ms. This fits with work
showing that dispreferred responses tend to be delayed (Kendrick
and Torreira, 2015). On the other side of the tree, the questions
split the data up into whether there is laughter in T1 or T2.
Invited laughter, when there is laughter in T1 and T2 produces
a mean FTO of around −150 ms (overlap). Again, this is in line
with the literature on laughter (see above).
The algorithm that generates the tree works as follows. First,
the strength of association between each predictor variable and
FTO is determined by a statistical test of independence. The
variable with the strongest association is chosen as the first node
in the tree. The data is divided according to this variable into two
sub-sets. The process repeats recursively with each sub-set until
all predictor variables are statistically independent from FTO in
each leaf of the tree.
The tree in Figure 1 was generated directly from data using
this automatic algorithm, but exhibits many of the empirical
observations in the existing literature. Variables used in decisions
nearer the top of the tree have a greater influence on the
outcome, so the tree would also predict that sequence type is
more important than laughter.
However, our data include continuous variables as well as
categorical variables. Figure 2 shows a second tree generated with
both sequence organization and processing predictor variables.
The first decision is the sex of the speaker of T1. For a given

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 125

Roberts et al.

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

FIGURE 1 | A decision tree splitting FTO data into groups by various measures of sequence organization.

turn transition, if T1 is spoken by a male, then we follow
the left branch. The next “question” splits the data into T1s
with initiating actions (e.g., questions) and T1s with responding
actions (e.g., answers). This continues all the way down the tree,
so that the leftmost bar chart shows the mean for FTOs where T1
was spoken by a male, T1 ended with an initiating action and T2
was spoken by a male. Looking at the next bar chat to the right, we
see that females have lower FTOs than males when T1 includes an
initiating action. For the sub-set with responding actions, we see
that the duration of T1 matters, with long turns leading to shorter
FTOs than short turns. This goes against the trend in the overall
data for long turns to elicit longer gaps. In this way, the decision
tree has separated a sub-set of data that behaves differently to the
rest, and which helps explain some of the variation.
On the other side of the tree, the second decision is the sex of
the speaker of T2. Comparing the leaves on the right, we see that
two female talkers tend to produce lower FTOs. Speech rate of T1
is included twice on the next level—the tree cuts the continuous
variable at different points for male and female T2 (variables can

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

only be divided into two categories at any one branch, but may
be further sub-divided at a later stage). This reflects the trend
for males to speak faster than females. For both male and female
speakers of T2, slower speech in T1 (higher T1 delta) leads to
shorter FTOs. The rightmost leaf represents 314 cases of FTOs
between two female speakers where T1 is speaking very slowly
(high delta). In this case, the mean FTO is in overlap.
The tree in Figure 2 shows the first three levels of a full tree. A
larger tree based on the full data is available in the Supplementary
Materials.
One problem with decision trees is that their structures are
not robust. The structure is sensitive to the selection of predictor
variables and the particular sample of data (Strobl et al., 2009;
Tagliamonte and Baayen, 2012). For example, the choice of the
first variable may have been based on a marginal trend in the
data, but may have a large effect on the subsequent choices.
One way around this problem is to generate a “forest” consisting
of a number of randomly generated trees. A sub-sample of the
data and a selection of variables are chosen randomly for each

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 126

Roberts et al.

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

FIGURE 2 | A decision tree splitting data into gaps and overlaps by measures of sequence organization and processing.

tree. Once a large number of trees has been run, the relative
importance of variables can be assessed.
We measure variable importance as the standard mean
decrease in classification accuracy when a variable is permuted
(see Breiman, 2001). For each tree in the forest, the prediction
error (mean squared error) is calculated by comparing the true
values of FTO to the values predicted by the tree. Taking the
variable for which the measure is to be calculated, the assignment
of each value of that variable to a case is randomly permuted
and the prediction error is re-calculated. The difference between
the two errors gives a measure of how influential the variable
is for prediction of FTO. The difference in errors are calculated
for all trees. The importance measure is then the mean of
these differences normalized by the standard deviation of the
differences.
The higher the importance value, the more influential the
variable is in predicting the dependent variable.
For our purposes, random forests provide a way of assessing
the relative importance of variables when the independent
variables are highly correlated and when relationships between
variables may be more complicated than simple linear patterns.
Random forests have been used to look at various phenomena
in linguistics (e.g., Bürki et al., 2011; Tagliamonte and Baayen,
2012; Plug and Carter, 2014; Sadat et al., 2014). Schneider (2014)
analyzed the Switchboard corpus using binary decision trees
and random forests to explore the distribution of hesitations in
turns according to word co-occurrence frequency. Hesitations
were less common between words that frequently co-occurred,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

supporting a “chunking” theory of language processing and
production (e.g., Arnon and Snider, 2010; Bybee, 2010).
However, this study did not consider the sequential organization
of turns. We implement random forests using the functions ctree
and cforest in the R package party (Hothorn et al., 2006a,b; Strobl
et al., 2007, 2008).
Decision trees split data into subsets that can be modeled
separately. That is, they try to find clusters of data that behave
in similar ways. This is slightly different from linear regression
which looks for linear relationships in the data as a whole. One
prediction from the processing account might be that turns with
low-frequency words will be responded to differently (slower)
than other turns. Therefore, the tree would split the data into
FTOs with high and low frequency T1s. A prediction from the
sequence organization account might be that negative responses
have higher FTOs, so the tree would split the data into FTOs
before positive and negative T2 responses.

7. Results
The distribution of FTOs is shown in Figure 3. The mean FTO
was 187 ms; the median was 168 ms; the standard deviation
was 448 ms; the mode (calculated by gaussian kernels with the
density function in R set to default parameters) was 169 ms.
For comparison, in our Switchboard data, the median for polar
questions followed by a response was 199 ms, and (Stivers et al.,
2009) found that the median FTO for polar questions followed by
a response was 200 ms.

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 127

Roberts et al.

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

FIGURE 3 | The distribution of floor transfer offsets (the gap between
two turns) for the Switchboard data.

Many of the predictor variables are correlated with each
other (three quarters of the variables were correlated with p <
0.05, see the Supplementary Materials), though there was only
weak evidence for multicollinearity (maximum variable inflation
factor = 3.9). The number of variables also makes the number
of possible interactions very high. These two factors make simple
linear regression analyses more difficult to interpret, but random
forests is a robust to these concerns. Here we report various
results relating to the random forests analyses.
A random forests model was run with 1000 trees and 3
variables in each tree (two runs of the model with different
random stating seeds produced highly correlated variable
importance measures, r = 0.996, df = 30, p < 0.001, suggesting
that the results are robust, the results are also highly correlated
when using 5 variables in each tree, see the Supplementary
Materials 1). To give an impression of the fit of the model, a single
tree was generated (like in the example above, but not limited to 3
levels). The predicted FTOs correlated with the actual FTOs with
r = 0.51, meaning that the model accounts for about 30% of the
variation. Another way of assessing the fit is to use the model to
predict values for each FTO. When categorizing FTOs into gaps
and overlaps, the model correctly categorizes 70% of cases.
In comparison, a simple linear model accounts for about 4%
of the variance in FTO (see Supplementary Materials). This result
is difficult to compare with linear models, since random forests
work very differently (random forests are based on decision trees
which divide data into sub-sets and fit each sub-set separately).
Still, the difference between the two suggests that overall trends
are weak, but there are more dependable patterns for certain
types of transition.
Figure 4 shows the importance estimate for each variable, as
calculated by the Random Forests analysis. This is an indicator
of the relative importance of each variable in explaining the
variation in FTO. The baseline for spurious variables is set as the
absolute lowest importance measure. All variables have a positive
importance value.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

FIGURE 4 | Variable importance in a random forest analysis of floor
transfer offset. The dotted red line shows the absolute smallest value, which
can be used as a baseline for spurious effects. Measures of processing appear
as circles (black labels) and measures of sequence organization appear as
triangles (orange labels). Other measures appear as crosses (purple labels).

The top five most important variables are whether T1 includes
a responding action, T1 duration, T2 duration, T1 speech rate
and T1 sex. Measures of processing and sequence organization
were not rated differently overall (mean importance for
processing measures = 1300, mean importance for sequence
organization measures = 1387, t = −0.21, p = 0.83; mean
rank for processing measures = 17.8, mean rank for sequence
organization measures = 16.1 t = 0.47, p = 0.64).
There was no large difference in the ranking of measures for
T1 compared to measures for T2 (t = −0.63, df = 26, p = 0.53).
For duration, speech rate and tree height the importance of the
variable for T1 is greater than for T2, suggesting more weight
on comprehension and planning. However, the opposite pattern
holds for concreteness, frequency, and surprisal measures.
In the following sub-sections, we consider some of the most
important variables, and comment on how they are related to
FTO. The ranking of importance comes directly from the model
results. However, the relationship with FTO is not easy to extract
from the model, since a particular variable may be used to divide
cases into sub-samples in very different ways. Therefore, when
considering the relationship between a given variable and FTO,
we explore the trends in the overall data.

7.1. Results for Measures of Processing
To give a sense of the overall trends for the processing measures,
Table 2 shows the simple, linear correlation between them and
FTO (more straightforward descriptive results can be found
in the Supplementary Materials). Most correlations are very

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 128

Roberts et al.

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

TABLE 2 | The Pearson correlation between processing measures and
FTO for T1 and T2.

Concreteness

T1

T2

0.028

−0.004

Mean frequency

−0.010

0.024

Speech rate

−0.091

−0.008

Information uniformity

−0.009

−0.004

Turn duration

0.043

0.025

−0.003

−0.012

Number of clauses

0.026

−0.019

Syntax tree height

0.065

0.012

−0.027

−0.014

Surprisal

Contextual diversity

weak, yet, as we show below, the random forests approach does
find robust patterns. This suggests that the the relationship
between measures of processing and FTO is complicated: overall
tendencies are weak, but more dependable patterns can be found
for certain types of transition.

7.1.1. Turn Duration and Rate
The variables ranked second and third most important are the
durations of T1 and T2. Both T1 and T2 duration have similar
relationships with FTO (see Figure 5). This relationship is nonlinear: overall, longer turns occur with longer FTOs, but very
short turns (less than 700 ms) are also followed by longer FTOs.
The production and comprehension prediction was that longer
turns would take longer to plan or comprehend, and therefore
possibly start later. However, since T2 length is not linearly
related to FTO, but the variable is ranked as highly important
in the random forests analysis, this suggests that turn duration
is being used as a proxy to distinguish different types of turn.
Indeed, around three quarters of turns less than 700 ms are
backchannels or agreements, while around three quarters of turns
longer than 700 ms are statements, opinions, and questions. In
line with this, the splits in the decision trees tend to divide data
by turn duration at around 700 ms (e.g., see example decision tree
in Supplementary Materials 2).
Speech rate of T1 is ranked as the 4th most important variable.
On average, as T1 is spoken faster, the FTO becomes longer (this
holds when excluding backchannels and short T1s). T1s spoken
with rates in the fastest quartile lead to FTOs around 100 ms
longer than those in the slowest quartile. The speech rate of T2
is ranked as much less important. There is no strong relationship
between T2 rate and FTO.

7.1.2. Syntactic Complexity
T1 syntactic tree height is relatively important (ranked 6th most
important out of 30), as is the number of clauses for T1 and
T2 (ranked 9th and 10th). As the T1 increases in syntactic
complexity, the FTO increases. Turns in the simplest quartile
lead to FTOs 64 ms shorter than turns in the most complex
quartile. There is no strong linear relationship between T2
syntactic complexity and FTO. The relative importance of the
number of clauses in T2 may be attributed to the correlation
with turn duration (r = 0.65, t = 171, p < 0.00001). Notice

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

that here, as with speech rate, the processing factors only have
significance in a particular sequential context, demonstrating
how the two parameters, sequence organization and processing
costs, are interwoven.

7.1.3. Concreteness
T2 concreteness is placed in the middle of the ranking. The
prediction was that turns with more concrete words will lead to
lower FTOs. However, the relationship with FTO is complicated.
There is no overall linear relationship. There are interactions
with turn duration so that there is a positive relationship for
short T2s and a negative relationship for longer T2s. This
could be explained in the following way: very short turns such
as backchannels tend to have very low concreteness ratings.
However, some short turns, such as answers to open questions
have very concrete ratings (e.g., “How many kids do you have?,”
“Two”). When combined with utterance duration, then, the
concreteness of T2 becomes a proxy for distinguishing response
tokens (simple to project and plan) from question answers
(more difficult to project and plan). Indeed, in a decision tree
constructed with only T2 concreteness and T2 duration, T2
concreteness is used in a branch of the tree with short T2 turns
and, within these turns, higher concreteness leads to longer
average FTOs (positive relationship).
T2 concreteness seems to be more related to the absolute
FTO, that is to how close the beginning of T2 is to the end of
T1, ignoring whether it’s a gap or overlap. There is an overall
positive correlation between absolute FTO and T2 concreteness
(r = 0.13), with the correlation being stronger as the length of
T1’s turn increases (for turns longer than 1000 ms, r = 0.23).
That is the timing of turn transition is more tightly timed when
T2 is less concrete (especially for longer T1s).
The relationship between T1 concreteness and FTO is more
straightforward. T1s with low mean concreteness ratings are
followed by short FTOs, while mid-range concreteness ratings
have longer FTOs. However, T1s with high mean concreteness
ratings have lower FTOs than mid-range turns.

7.2. Results for Measures of Sequence
Organization
7.2.1. Initiating and Responding Actions
The most important factor in the whole random forests analysis is
whether T1’s (final) dialog act includes a responding action (e.g.,
an answer to a question). On average, FTOs are smaller when
T1 includes a responding action (150 ms, compared to 202 ms
in other cases, post-hoc t = 7.9, p < 0.00001). Whether T2 starts
with a responding action, and whether T2 starts with an initiating
action are also ranked as relatively important, and since they form
the basis of sequence organization they are discussed together
here. Figure 6 shows the mean FTOs for different combinations
of T1 and T2 sequence types.
The mean FTO when T1 initiates and T2 responds (e.g., a
question in T1, followed by an answer in T2) is 200.7 ms. This
kind of sequence forms the basis of adjacency pairs (see Section
4.1), and agrees very well with results for polar questions from
Stivers et al. (2009).

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 129

Roberts et al.

The mean FTO is longer when T1 responds and T2 initiates
(284.8 ms), a floor transition involving turns which do not form
an adjacency pair. For example, in the extract below, B asks
a question (“lots of little funny spots, huh?”), and A gives an
answer (“Oh, yeah, yeah”). This is a well-formed adjacency pair.
However, if we consider the answer as T1, the next turn T2 is a
different question from B. These latter turns are not part of an
adjacency pair, but belong to other sequences.
Conversation 3254, 0:19
(A and B are comparing a modern adaptation of the Adams
Family with the original TV series, which includes a character
called Thing)

T1
T2

A: Uh, there were a few things different
than the old series, but on the, on
the whole, it was pretty similar.
And, a lot of fun.
B: Lots of little funny spots, huh?
A: Oh, yeah, yeah. (Responding)
FTO = + 614 ms
B: Did they have Thing, and,
(Initiating)
A: Oh, yes, in fact, Thing has a big,
much bigger role than he does in the
series.

Another possible case is that in which floor transfers occur
between two initiating actions. In such cases, the mean FTO
was the longest (298 ms). In our data, these often involve cases
of other-initiated repair (34% of all repair initiators occur in a
transition where T1 and T2 include initiating actions; 40% of
turn transitions where both T1 and T2 include initiating actions
involve repair). The following example is a case of other initiated
repair. B asks a question (initiating action), but A does not hear or
understand, and initiates a repair sequence on the previous turn.
B goes on to rephrase their question, and A resumes the main
question-answer sequence:

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

Conversation 3232, 2:13
(A and B are discussing scholarships)

T1
T2

B: -- it paid most of my tuition, and,
um, a lot of the book costs and that
kind of thing, so.
A: Wow, that’s great.
B: Yeah, I really,
A: Was it a Pell grant? / (Initiating)
FTO = +494 ms
B: I’m sorry, what did you say?
(Initiating)
A: What kind of grant was it?
B: Well, it was called a B E O G,
a Basic Equal Opportunity Grant

In line with our results, Kendrick (2015) finds that repair
initiators are delayed compared to answers to questions.
Finally, we see that the shortest average FTOs are when both
T1 and T2 involve responding actions. In this case, the mean
FTO is shorter (157 ms). Many of these sequences involve T1
being a backchannel. Looking closer, we also find that many are

FIGURE 6 | Mean FTOs between turns with different kind of sequential
actions (responding and initiating).

FIGURE 5 | The relationship between FTO and T1 and T2 duration. The data is grouped into 500 ms bins. Circles represent the mean of the bin, with bars
showing the 95% confidence intervals.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 130

Roberts et al.

part of sequences of assessment. The example below involves a
news delivery sequence (e.g., Maynard, 1997). A announces some
news and B delivers a news receipt (“wow”), after which there are
several elaboration turns with assessments.
Conversation 3201 3:00
(A is talking about a recycling service)

T1
T2

A: But, uh, they just go around to
each, uh, door and pick it up.
B: Wow, that’s excellent.
A: Yeah. (Responding)
FTO = +137 ms
B: That’s good. (Responding)

Similarly, in the next example, A responds to B’s statement with
an assessment in T1, and then B produces a second assessment in
T2.
Conversation 3526 2:44
(A and B are talking about cheap computers sold at a local
warehouse)

T1
T2

B: Yeah it and when it comes on the
manufacturing floor it’s about ten
bucks
A: I’ll be darned (Responding)
FTO = +206
B: Yeah (Responding)
A: Huh well
B: Well i watched something on TV a
couple of months ago by uh General
ex uh Surgeon General Koop

7.2.2. Backchannels
T1 including a backchannel is ranked 9th out of 30 in terms of
importance. Looking at the effect of this variable post-hoc, we
observed that, when T1 is a backchannel, the FTO is around
38 ms lower on average than otherwise. This could occur if
backchannels are regularly overlapped because they are not
treated as real turns at talk (see SL & FT in Levinson et al.,
2015). Indeed, the average FTO when T1 includes a backchannel
is lower (with backchannel = 157 ms, without backchannel =
194 ms, post-hoc t = 5.43, p < 0.0001; 35% of T1 backchannels
are overlapped by the next turn, compared to 28% of other
cases). There is no big difference in means according to whether
T2 is a backchannel (with backchannel = 195 ms, without
backchannel = 183 ms, post − hoct = −1.9, p = 0.06) and
this is reflected in it being ranked as relatively unimportant in
the random forests results.

7.2.3. Positive Responses
Whether T2 provides a positive response is ranked in the middle
of the distribution of importance. Post-hoc tests revealed that
FTOs are 55 ms longer on average when T2 includes a negative
response (t = 2.38, df = 1348, p = 0.02). This is in line with a
delay for dispreferred responses, but the size of the effect is very
small (the effect is weaker in a mixed effects model controlling
for speaker identity and dialect), especially in comparison to the
effect of T2 being a responding action vs. not.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

7.3. Other Effects
The sex of the speakers is relatively important, with each male in
the conversation adding around 70 ms on average to the FTO
(similar differences are obtained from a mixed effects model
controlling for speaker identity and speaker dialect).
The rest of the variables have weaker importance values, but
some observations are worth making. Many processing variables
are not highly ranked, especially measures of information and
surprisal, but also frequency, which goes against the processing
predictions.
FTOs are on average lower for transitions involving laughter
(mean without laughter = 192 ms, mean with laughter in T1 or
T2 or both = 112 ms, post-hoc t = 5.4, p < 0.00001). FTOs are
shortest when there is invited laughter: when there is laugher
in both T1 and T2, the average FTO is -142 ms (overlap), as
predicted by the literature on laughter in conversation. However,
the laugher variables are the lowest rated variable according to
the random forests analysis. This could be due to the relatively
small number of cases that include laughter (about 4% of cases).

8. Model Without Turn-Preserving
Placeholders
As discussed in Section 7, the beginnings of some turns may be
turn-preserving placeholders, hesitation markers such as “um”
and “uh,” that speakers use to “buffer” their response. This could
obscure the demands on processing. To explore this, the same
model was run, but calculating the FTO as the time from the
end of T1 to the first non-turn-preserving placeholder in T2.
The full results are available in the Supplementary Materials. The
importance estimates in this model were weakly correlated with
the main model importance estimates reported in the section
above (r = 0.597, df = 30, p = 0.0003; rank correlation =
0.73). The prediction from processing is that the processing
variables would be ranked as more important in this case, since
placeholders gives responders time to plan.
The main difference in this model is that T2 turn duration
has increased in importance. That is, the length of T2’s turn
is a better predictor of gap duration when turn-preserving
placeholders are ignored. This could be evidence that speakers are
“buffering” turns which require more planning. Overall, however,
the processing measures do not become more important on
average. Also, measures for T2 did not increase in relative
importance compared to measures for T1.
Therefore, while there is some evidence that turn-preserving
placeholders do buffer planning, the importance of sequential
organization variables in explaining FTO cannot be easily
attributed to this effect.

9. Discussion
This paper has examined explanations for the timing of turn
taking taken either from hypotheses about cognitive processing
or from those originating from sequence organization. Neither
processing nor sequence organization dominated as important
measures. Basic sequence organization measures such as the

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 131

Roberts et al.

sequential status of turns were informative, as were measures
of turn duration, speech rate, and syntactic complexity. Perhaps
unexpectedly, measures of frequency and surprisal were ranked
as much less important, even though they are known to affect
processing and production of language in laboratory conditions.
This suggests that, in real conversation, these effects often only
apply in specific sequential positions, e.g., in T1 or T2, or when
T1 is initiating, showing that the two kinds of account are
interwoven.
One question is the suitability of the measures used. The
measures of processing, for example, are not direct measures of
cognitive activity, but properties of utterances that are known
to correlate with processing. Having said this, the sequence
organization measures are also very coarse, suggesting that
this is not biasing the comparison between the two domains.
Obviously, more direct on-line measurement of processing
during conversation would be ideal (e.g., Holler and Kendrick,
2015). Experimental control and ecological validity are difficult
to balance, but this study suggests that such an approach is
warranted in the future.
In some cases, there was a difference in the predictions for
processing and sequence organization accounts. For speech rate,
we found that faster speech is responded to with longer FTOs.
This fits with a processing account rather than a straightforward
“rhythm” account, which would predict that a faster beat would
lead to a faster response. Although speech rate is not the same as
rhythm, and a more suitable analysis would be to code the dataset
for rhythm, we still find little support for the idea that responders
generally respond on the first beat, all other things being
equal.
The random forests analysis explained a reasonable amount
of the variance in FTOs. While it’s clear that the timing of turn
taking is a noisy process, the analysis suggests that there are
systematic principles. The relatively good performance of the
random forests analysis compared with the linear analysis also
suggests that the principles are context-sensitive, rather than
applying across the board. For example, certain processing effects
being only evident in certain sequential contexts.
Indexical information such as the sex of each speaker
was ranked as relatively important. However, these differences
may not be linked inherently to sex (e.g., through processing
differences), but may reflect differences in socio-cultural norms
or simply individual differences.

10. Conclusion
We began with the observation that communication systems
are imaginable, the marmoset system a putative case, in which
issues of cognitive load and sequence organization play little
role in influencing temporal patterns of behavior. Human
communication contrasts on both dimensions, because of the
formidable choice of alternatives faced by a speaker and the
consequent unpredictability faced by a responder on the one
hand, and on the other because sequences of ordered turns map
structure onto the sheer fact that T1 is followed by T2.
By using a large coded corpus we have been able to track the
importance of a set of different measures of each dimension.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

We conclude that the temporal patterns of dialogue cannot
be accounted for by either cognitive or sequence organization
factors alone. The two are interwoven with indexical factors in
such a way that, for example, the sex of a speaker in a particular
initiating sequence type creates an environment where cognitive
load plays a particularly strong role in influencing the speed of
response. This suggests that an explanation of the timing of turn
taking will involve a combination of insights from both cognitive
processing and sequential organization.
The ways in which factors load only in specific ecological
niches make standard regression techniques inapplicable. Here
the method employed, random forests, comes into its own,
allowing the factor loading to be discerned in specific ecological
niche formed by indexical factors, processing factors and
sequence factors, as illustrated in the tree in Figure 2. The kinds
of binary decision trees produced in this paper make predictions
that could also be tested experimentally. There is also the
possibility of using real conversational data from the Switchboard
corpus as stimuli material to create a cycle of qualitative analysis
and quantitative testing (e.g. Kendrick and Torreira, 2015).
This study has not exhausted the information in the
Switchboard corpus. It would be possible to analyze further the
different distinctions in dialog actions, such as the distinction
between polar questions and content questions (initial analyses
suggest that polar questions are responded to up to 100 ms sooner
than content questions). There is also more indexical information
such as age and dialect. Speakers were assigned topics of
conversation and these may also have stimulated speakers to
different degrees, which could affect average FTOs. There are also
a range of phonetic information and semantic factors that could
be explored. This study thus has distinct limitations. Extending
the analysis to other corpora and other languages will however
require large amounts of transcribed speech data, matched with
processing information such as frequency and surprisal for many
languages.

10.1. Human Search and Animal Research
All data collected from individuals were from sources where
informed consent had been provided.

10.2. Data Sharing
Source data is available to download online (see the various
references in the main text). The analysis software is also
available: pympi (Lubbers and Torreira, 2014); ELAN, developed
by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Wittenburg
et al., 2006) http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/.

Author Contributions
Extracted and prepared the data: FT; Calculated FTO: FT;
analyzed the data: SR, FT; Wrote the manuscript: SR, FT, SL.

Funding
SR
of

is supported by
Language
project

the Interactional Foundations
within
the
Language
and

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 132

Roberts et al.

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

Cognition Department at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics.

to SL. We thank the Max Planck Society for additional
support.

Acknowledgements

Supplementary Material

Thanks to Mart Lubbers for technical support. This research
was conducted within, and partially financed by, the
framework of ERC Advanced Grant No. 269484 INTERACT

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found
online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.
2015.00509/abstract

References

Gisladottir, R. S., Chwilla, D. J., Schriefers, H., and Levinson, S. C. (2012).
“Speech act recognition in conversation: experimental evidence,” in Proceedings
of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Sapporo),
1596–1601.
Glenn, P. J. (1989). Initiating shared laughter in multi-party conversations. West.
J. Commun. 53, 127–149.
Glenn, P. J. (2003). Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Godfrey, J. J., Holliman, E. C., and McDaniel, J. (1992). “Switchboard: telephone
speech corpus for research and development,” in 1992 IEEE International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1992. ICASSP-92, Vol. 1,
(San Francisco, CA), 517–520.
Haakana, M. (2002). Laughter in medical interaction: from quantification to
analysis, and back. J. Sociolinguist. 6, 207–235. doi: 10.1111/1467-9481.00185
Hanley, J. R., Hunt, R. P., Steed, D. A., and Jackman, S. (2013). Concreteness and
word production. Mem. Cogn. 41, 365–377. doi: 10.3758/s13421-012-0266-5
Heldner, M., and Edlund, J. (2010). Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations. J.
Phonet. 38, 555–568. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2010.08.002
Heritage, J. (1984). “A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential
placement,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis,
ed J. M. Atkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 299–345. doi:
10.1017/CBO9780511665868
Holler, J., and Kendrick, K. H. (2015). Unaddressed participants gaze in
multi-person interaction: optimizing recipiency. Front. Psychol. 6:98. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00098
Hothorn, T., Bühlmann, P., Dudoit, S., Molinaro, A., and Van Der Laan, M. J.
(2006a). Survival ensembles. Biostatistics 7, 355–373. doi: 10.1093/biostatistics/
kxj011
Hothorn, T., Hornik, K., and Zeileis, A. (2006b). Unbiased recursive partitioning:
a conditional inference framework. J. Comput. Graph. Stat. 15, 651–674. doi:
10.1198/106186006X133933
Jefferson, G. (1974). Notes on the Sequential Organization of Laughter in
Conversation: Onset Sensitivity in Invitations to Laugh. Mexico City: American
Anthropological Association Convention.
Jefferson, G. (1984). “On the organization of laughter in talk about troubles,” in
Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, Vol. 346369, eds
J. M. Atkinson and J. C. Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
346–369.
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on latencyin overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.
Jurafsky, D., Shriberg, E., and Biasca, D. (1997). Switchboard SWBD-DAMSL
Shallowdiscourse-Function Annotation Coders Manual. Institute of Cognitive
Science Technical Report, Boulder, 97–102.
Kemper, S., and Rash, S. (1988). Speech and writing across the life-span. Pract.
Aspects Mem. Curr. Res. Issues 2, 107–112.
Kemper, S., Kynette, D., Rash, S., O’Brien, K., and Sprott, R. (1989). Life-span
changes to adults’ language: effects of memory and genre. Appl. Psycholinguist.
10, 49–66.
Kendrick, K. H., and Torreira, F. (2015). The timing and construction of
preference: a quantitative study. Discourse Process 52, 255–289. doi: 10.1080/
0163853X.2014.955997
Kendrick, K. H. (2015). The intersection of turn-taking and repair: the timing
of other-initiations of repair in conversation. Front. Psychol. 6:250. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00250
Kutas, M., and Hillyard, S. A. (1984). Brain potentials during reading reflect word
expectancy and semantic association. Nature 307, 161–163.

Arnon, I., and Snider, N. (2010). More than words: frequency effects for multiword phrases. J. Mem. Lang. 62, 67–82. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2009.09.005
Atkinson, J. M., and Heritage, J. (1984). “Preference organization,” in Structures of
Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed J. M. Atkinson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 53–56. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511665868
Bögels, S., and Torreira, F. (in press). Listeners use intonational phrase boundaries
to project turn ends in spoken interaction. J. Phonetics.
Bürki, A., Alario, F. X., and Frauenfelder, U. H. (2011). Lexical representation
of phonological variants: evidence from pseudohomophone effects in different
regiolects. J. Mem. Lang. 64, 424–442. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2011.01.002
Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Cortese, M. J., Hutchison, K. A., Kessler, B., Loftis, B.,
et al. (2007). The english lexicon project. Behav. Res. Methods 39, 445–459. doi:
10.3758/BF03193014
Breiman, L. (2001).
Random forests.
Mach. Learn. 45, 5–32. doi:
10.1023/A:1010933404324
Brysbaert, M., and New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: a critical
evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and
improved word frequency measure for american english. Behav. Res. Methods
41, 977–990. doi: 10.3758/BRM.41.4.977
Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A., and Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for
40 thousand generally known english word lemmas. Behav. Res. Methods 46,
904–911. doi: 10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5
Bybee, J. L. (2010). Language, Usage and Cognition, Vol. 98. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Calhoun, S., Carletta, J., Brenier, J. M., Mayo, N., Jurafsky, D., Steedman, M., et al.
(2010). The NXT-format switchboard corpus: a rich resource for investigating
the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and prosody of dialogue. Lang. Resour. Eval.
44, 387–419. doi: 10.1007/s10579-010-9120-1
Clark, H. H., and Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking.
Cognition 84, 73–111. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00017-3
Clark, H. H. (1976). Semantics and Comprehension, Janua Linguarum. Series Minor
187. Boston: DE GRUYTER MOUTON.
Clayman, S. E., Heritage, J., Elliott, M. N., and McDonald, L. L. (2007). When
does the watchdog bark? Conditions of aggressive questioning in presidential
news conferences. Am. Soc. Rev. 72, 23–41. doi: 10.1177/0003122407072
00102
Clayman, S. E. (2002). Sequence and solidarity. Adv. Group Process. 19, 229–253.
doi: 10.1016/S0882-6145(02)19009-6
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (1993). English Speech Rhythm: Form and Function in Everyday
Verbal Interaction, Vol. 25. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing.
De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
Deshmukh, N., Ganapathiraju, A., Gleeson, A., Hamaker, J., and Picone, J. (1998).
“Resegmentation of switchboard,” in ICSLP (Syndey).
Drew, P. (2013). “Turn design,” in The Handbook of Conversation Analysis,
eds J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Online Library),
131–149.
Ford, C. E., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). Interactional units in conversation:
syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns.
Stud. Interact. Sociolinguist. 13, 134–184.
Gardner, R. (2001). When Listeners Talk: Response Tokens and Listener Stance,
Vol. 92. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 133

Roberts et al.

Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., and Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in
speech production. Behav. Brain Sci. 22, 1–75.
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. (2006). “On the human interaction engine,” in Roots of Human
Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Human Interaction, eds N. Enfield and S.
Levinson (Oxford: Berg), 39–69.
Levinson, S. C. (2013a).
“Action formation and ascription,”
in The
Handbook of Conversation Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell), 103–130.
Levinson, S. C. (2013b). Recursion in pragmatics. Language 89, 149–162. doi:
10.1353/lan.2013.0005
Levinson, S. C., Holler, J., Kendrick, K. H., and Casillas, M. (2015). Turntaking in human communicative interaction. Front. Psychol. Res. Top. Available
online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/researchtopic/turn-taking-in-humancommunicative-interaction-2845
Liberman, M. (2014), Um, there’s timing information in switchboard? Available
online at: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=14991
Local, J. (1996). Conversational phonetics: some aspects of news receipts in
everyday talk. Stud. Interact. Sociolinguist. 12, 177–230.
Lubbers, M., and Torreira, F. (2014). Pympi Python Library Version 1.1. Available
online at: https://github.com/dopefishh/pympi
Magyari, L., and De Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on
anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.
00376
Marcus, M. P., Santorini, B., Marcinkiewicz, M. A., and Taylor, A. (1999).
Treebank-3. (Linguistic Data Consortium Catalog (LDC) Catalog LDC99T42).
Maynard, D. W. (1997). The news delivery sequence: bad news and good news in
conversational interaction. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 30, 93–130.
Piantadosi, S., Tily, H., and Gibson, E. (2011). Word lengths are optimized for
efficient communication. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108, 3526–3529. doi:
10.1073/pnas.1012551108
Plug, L., and Carter, P. (2014).
Timing and tempo in spontaneous
phonological error repair. J. Phonet. 45, 52–63. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2014.
03.007
Potts, C. (2011). The Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus. Available online at: http://
compprag.christopherpotts.net/swda.html
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics
for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 40,
696–735.
Sadat, J., Martin, C. D., Costa, A., and Alario, F. (2014).
Reconciling
phonological neighborhood effects in speech production through single
trial analysis.
Cogn. Psychol. 68, 33–58. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2013.
10.001
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction, Vol. 1. A Primer in
Conversation Analysis, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, U. (2014). “Cart trees and random forests in linguistics,” in
Hochleistungsrechnen in Baden-Wuerttemberg-Ausgewaehlte Aktivitaeten im
bwGRiD 2012: Beitraege zu Anwenderprojekten und Infrastruktur im bwGRiD
im Jahr 2012, eds J. C. Schulz and S. Hermann (Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific
Publishing), 67.
Schwanenflugel, P. J., Harnishfeger, K. K., and Stowe, R. W. (1988). Context
availability and lexical decisions for abstract and concrete words. J. Mem. Lang.
27, 499–520.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Processing and Sequence Organization in turn taking

Stivers, T., and Enfield, N. J. (2010). A coding scheme for question–response
sequences in conversation. J. Pragmat. 42, 2620–2626. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.
2010.04.002
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Stolt, M. (2008). The Many Faces of Overlap: Non-Competitive Overlap in a
Conversation between Finnish and British Speakers of English. Ph.D. thesis,
University of Jyväskylä.
Strömbergsson, S., Hjalmarsson, A., Edlund, J., and House, D. (2013). “Timing
responses to questions in dialogue,” in Proceedings of the Annual Conference
of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2013
(Lyon: International Speech and Communication Association), 2584–2588.
Strobl, C., Boulesteix, A.-L., Zeileis, A., and Hothorn, T. (2007). Bias in random
forest variable importance measures. BMC Bioinformatics 8, 1–10. doi: 10.1186/
1471-2105-8-25
Strobl, C., Boulesteix, A.-L., Kneib, T., Augustin, T., and Zeileis, A. (2008).
Conditional variable importance for random forests. BMC Bioinformatics
9:307. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-9-307
Strobl, C., Malley, J., and Tutz, G. (2009). An introduction to recursive partitioning:
rationale, application, and characteristics of classification and regression
trees, bagging, and random forests. Psychol. Methods 14, 323. doi: 10.1037/
a0016973
Tagliamonte, S. A., and Baayen, R. H. (2012). Models, forests, and trees
of york english: was/were variation as a case study for statistical
practice. Lang. Variat. Change 24, 135–178. doi: 10.1017/S0954394512
000129
Takahashi, D. Y., Narayanan, D. Z., and Ghazanfar, A. A. (2013). Coupled oscillator
dynamics of vocal turn-taking in monkeys. Curr. Biol. 23, 2162–2168. doi:
10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.005
Torreira, F., Bögels, S., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). Breathing for answering: the
time course of response planning in conversation. Front. Psychol. 6:284. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00284
Walker, I., and Hulme, C. (1999). Concrete words are easier to recall than abstract
words: evidence for a semantic contribution to short-term serial recall. J. Exp.
Psychol. 25, 1256.
Wightman, C. W., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M., and Price, P. J. (1992).
Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries. J. Acoust.
Soc. Am. 91, 1707–1717.
Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., and Sloetjes, H. (2006).
“Elan: a professional framework for multimodality research,” in Proceedings of
LREC, 2006 (Genoa).
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Roberts, Torreira and Levinson. This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution
or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

May 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 509 | 134

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 12 March 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00284

Breathing for answering: the time
course of response planning in
conversation
Francisco Torreira 1*, Sara Bögels 1 and Stephen C. Levinson 1, 2
1
Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2 Donders Institute
for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Edited by:
F-Xavier Alario,
CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université,
France
Reviewed by:
Amélie Rochet-Capellan,
CNRS, France
Martin Corley,
University of Edinburgh, UK
*Correspondence:
Francisco Torreira, Language and
Cognition Department, Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Wundtlaan 1, 6525XD Nijmegen,
Netherlands
francisco.torreira@mpi.nl

We investigate the timing of pre-answer inbreaths in order to shed light on the time
course of response planning and execution in conversational turn-taking. Using acoustic
and inductive plethysmography recordings of seven dyadic conversations in Dutch, we
show that pre-answer inbreaths in conversation typically begin briefly after the end of
questions. We also show that the presence of a pre-answer inbreath usually co-occurs
with substantially delayed answers, with a modal latency of 576 vs. 100 ms for answers
not preceded by an inbreath. Based on previously reported minimal latencies for internal
intercostal activation and the production of speech sounds, we propose that vocal
responses, either in the form of a pre-utterance inbreath or of speech proper when an
inbreath is not produced, are typically launched in reaction to information present in the
last portion of the interlocutor’s turn. We also show that short responses are usually made
on residual breath, while longer responses are more often preceded by an inbreath. This
relation of inbreaths to answer length suggests that by the time an inbreath is launched,
typically during the last few hundred milliseconds of the question, the length of the answer
is often prepared to some extent. Together, our findings are consistent with a two-stage
model of response planning in conversational turn-taking: early planning of content often
carried out in overlap with the incoming turn, and late launching of articulation based on
the identification of turn-final cues.
Keywords: breathing, turn-taking, conversation, language planning, language production, speech planning,
speech production, turn projection

Introduction
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences, a section of the
journal Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 20 November 2014
Accepted: 26 February 2015
Published: 12 March 2015
Citation:
Torreira F, Bögels S and Levinson SC
(2015) Breathing for answering: the
time course of response planning in
conversation. Front. Psychol. 6:284.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00284

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Conversation is the core ecological niche for language—it is where language is learnt and most
heavily used. Conversation is characterized by the rapid alternation of speakers, who each take
mostly small turns at talk, generally avoid vocal overlap, and minimize the gap between turns (Sacks
et al., 1974). This behavior appears to be, with minor wrinkles, universal in character (Stivers et al.,
2009). Despite the universality and stability of this behavior, conversational turn-taking has figured little in theories about language processing, even though it poses a fundamental puzzle for
them. Reported average inter-turn gap durations in the literature fall between 0 and 300 ms (e.g.,
De Ruiter et al., 2006; Stivers et al., 2009; Heldner and Edlund, 2010), but the latencies in language
planning for production are much longer: it takes 600–1200 ms (depending on word frequency)
to begin labeling a picture of an object from the moment it becomes visible (Levelt et al., 1999;
Indefrey and Levelt, 2004), and it takes 1500 ms to begin producing a simple sentence describing an

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 135

Torreira et al.

action picture (Griffin and Bock, 2000). Even allowing for contextual priming and facilitation, these latencies are substantial.
This would seem to rule out the idea that participants simply
respond to turn ends: the fastest human reaction times are of
the order of 100–200 ms and the minimal latency reported for a
pre-rehearsed syllable is 210 ms (Fry, 1975). Moreover, the speech
signal has many brief moments of silence related to the ongoing linguistic signal (e.g., stop consonant closures), often lasting
a similar duration to inter-turn gaps. So one could not recognize a silent gap as a gap before approximately 100–200 ms which,
combined with minimal reaction time latency, would yield a conversational gap of 300–400 ms. These figures leave no time for the
500–1200 ms planning latencies of speech production discussed
above, so the paradox of quick responses using a slow production
system persists.
A plausible solution to the paradox is that, as foreseen in Sacks
et al. (1974), responders often predict the content of the incoming turn, which allows them to begin planning a relevant response
in advance of the turn end. The question still remains how listeners know when to articulate their response without causing
unwanted overlap or long silent gaps (which may be semiotically loaded; cf. Kendrick and Torreira, 2015). Two possibilities can be envisaged. First, as proposed in a long tradition of
observational studies (e.g., Duncan, 1972; Wells and MacFarlane,
1998; Caspers, 2003; Local and Walker, 2012), responders may
launch articulation upon identifying turn-final cues (e.g., phrasefinal melodic patterns, final lengthening, specific bodily gestures)
occurring in the last syllables of their interlocutor’s turn. This
strategy could produce short gaps of 100 or 200 ms, only if at least
the initial linguistic material of the responder’s turn is ready to be
articulated by the time the interlocutor’s turn comes to an end.
An alternative option is that responders not only predict the
content of incoming turns well in advance, but also estimate their
timing on the basis of this prediction, and adjust the time course
of their production planning based on such temporal estimation.
In support of this view, for instance, De Ruiter et al. (2006) doubt
that turn-final cues such as phrase-final intonation patterns are
of any use for purposes of turn-taking, since they may occur too
late in the turn to allow the listener to anticipate its end. Along
the same lines, Magyari and de Ruiter (2012) state that it is very
plausible that listeners know more than half a second in advance
that a turn is going to end. Based on the results of a gating experiment, they propose that listeners make predictions in advance
about which words and how many words will follow a partially
heard turn, and that they use this prediction in order to estimate
the remaining duration of that turn.
In this article, we explore the time course of response planning
in conversation by focusing on an ancillary source of information
about language production neglected so far in psycholinguistic
discussions of turn-taking, namely, breathing. Several studies
have identified a relationship between breathing behavior and
utterance duration, indicating that breathing can be informative about the scope of language planning (e.g., Winkworth
et al., 1995; Whalen and Kinsella-Shaw, 1997; Fuchs et al., 2013;
Rochet-Capellan and Fuchs, 2013). Fuchs et al. (2013) investigated several speech planning parameters, including inhalation
depth and inhalation duration, using read materials varying in

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Breathing for answering

length and syntactic complexity, and found that inhalation depth
and duration were positively correlated with utterance length.
Using a corpus of spontaneous conversation, Rochet-Capellan
and Fuchs (2013) also observed positive correlations between
utterance length and inbreath depth and duration. Given that
pre-utterance inbreaths are indicative of the length of upcoming utterances, and that in spontaneous conversation they usually
take over half a second to complete (McFarland, 2001), their timing with respect to an interlocutor’s turn end in a turn-taking
situation may offer interesting insights into the time course of the
response planning process. If listeners estimate the timing of turn
ends half a second or more in advance of the turn end to time
their own response, for instance by predicting the final words
of a turn and their duration (cf. Magyari and de Ruiter, 2012),
we should observe that they often inhale well in advance of turn
ends so that their response can be produced at the right moment
(much like singers and wind instrument players do in advance
of their musical entries as specified in the score). If, on the other
hand, responders typically determine the position of turn ends
on the basis of turn-final information, we should observe that
pre-utterance inbreaths tend to be taken close to the end of the
interlocutor’s turn, and that answers preceded by an inbreath are
substantially delayed compared to answers produced on residual breath. These two alternative mechanisms, early anticipation
vs. local detection of turn ends, are presented schematically in
Figure 1.
A relevant issue concerning the design of this study is whether
we should investigate all conversational turns in a corpus across
the board, or whether we should focus instead on a specific,
more controlled, conversational context. While the first approach
has the advantage of potentially producing more generalizable
results, it may prevent us from uncovering relevant trends in the
data due to uncontrolled sources of variability. For instance, contexts in which floor changes are optional involve the complexity
of deciding who will be the next speaker, which will affect the
timing of the next turn in unpredictable ways. To overcome such
difficulties, we have decided to focus on inbreaths taken before

Early anticipation of turn ends:

*:

*
Local detection of turn ends:

*
Time

FIGURE 1 | Schematic representation of two possible response
production mechanism involving a pre-utterance inbreath (see text for
details).

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 136

Torreira et al.

answers in question-answer sequences, in which a conversational
response is explicitly requested by the current speaker. In this
sense, question-answer sequences provide an optimal conversational context in which to begin studying the time course of
language planning during conversational turn-taking (cf. Stivers
et al., 2009). Moreover, question-answer sequences can be identified in a reasonably objective way on the basis of the morphosyntactic and intonational marking of questions, and of the
recognizability of following turns as relevant answers (cf. Stivers
and Enfield, 2010). Finally, and importantly, question-answer
sequences are one of the most common action sequences in
spontaneous conversation, and can therefore provide a sufficient
number of observations in a medium-sized corpus such as the
one used in this study (see Section Material and Data Extraction).
Because we intend to use pre-utterance inbreaths as indicators
of the time course and scope of language planning, we will first
assess whether breathing behavior is related to utterance length
in our data, as found in previous studies. We will also need to
control for the role of other communicative factors that may
be at play in conversational data. It is possible that, in conversation, pre-utterance inbreaths function as meaningful elements
tied to the upcoming utterance, rather than as mere preparatory
phases of upcoming utterances (cf. Schegloff, 2006). Kendrick
and Torreira (2015) studied the timing and construction of
preferred and dispreferred responses to invitations, offers, and
requests (i.e., acceptances vs. rejections) in a corpus of telephone
calls in English, and found that dispreferred responses tend to
be preceded by an audible inbreath more often than preferred
responses. It is therefore possible that in dispreferred responses,
speakers want to make their pre-utterance inbreaths salient for
the listener to indicate the preference status of their responses in
advance, and that, for this reason, they avoid taking them in complete overlap with the interlocutor’s turn. Rochet-Capellan and
Fuchs (2013), also using spontaneous conversational materials,
observed that utterances containing vocalized hesitations were
preceded by deeper inhalations. An anonymous reviewer notes
that, because of this, it is possible that pre-utterance inbreaths are
also produced by speakers as indicators of hesitations and disfluencies in their upcoming utterances, and that this may constitute
another reason for answerers to avoid taking inbreaths in overlap
with the interlocutor’s turn. In order to better assess the relationship between breathing behavior and language planning in our
statistical analyses, we will take into account the preference status
of the response, and the presence of disfluencies in the response.
The following section presents a description of an audiovisual
corpus of spontaneous conversation in Dutch including inductive
plethysmography recordings of respiratory activity, the extraction and coding of question-answer sequences from this corpus,
and the measurement scheme applied to the data. Section Results
then presents several statistical analyses aimed at answering the
research questions discussed above, namely, (a) whether the characteristics of pre-utterance inbreaths in spontaneous conversation are related to the scope of language planning, (b) whether
responses preceded by an inbreath are delayed with respect to
end of the interlocutor’s turn compared to responses spoken on
residual breath, and (c) what the most common timing of preutterance inbreaths is relative to the end of the interlocutor’s turn.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Breathing for answering

In section Discussion, we review and interpret our findings, and
sketch a turn-taking response production mechanism accounting for both the most common trends in the data and previously
reported estimates of language processing latencies.

Materials and Methods
Material and Data Extraction
The corpus collection procedure and its use for research purposes were approved by the Ethics Committee Faculty of Social
Sciences of the Radboud University Nijmegen. The corpus collection took place in a sound-attenuated room at the Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics. We recorded seven dyadic conversations between Dutch male friends, all of them university
students except one participant (a research assistant). The reason for only recording males is that inductive plethysmography
measurements are obtained more reliably from male participants
than from female participants. Each recording had a duration
of around 45 min, for an approximate total of 6 h and 15 min
of dyadic conversation. Participants were briefly instructed to
entertain a conversation with their dyad partner while sitting on
chairs placed 1.5–2 m from each other, and oriented toward each
other at an angle of 120 degrees. Each participant took part in the
recordings only once.
The recording equipment consisted of a high-definition camera placed in front of the speakers, Shure SM10A head-mounted
microphones, and an InductotraceTM inductive plethysmography system. Each participant wore an Inductotrace band attached
around his chest at the level of the axilla, each connected to
one of the two channels of the Inductotrace unit, and a head
mounted-microphone coupled to an amplifier. The speech and
breathing signals were recorded simultaneously at a sampling
frequency of 48 kHz via an A/D converter connected to a computer. The breathing signals exhibited an upward drift starting
approximately 10 min into the recording. Such a drift has not
been reported in previous studies using the Inductotrace system, perhaps because their recordings were much shorter than
ours. In order to correct this drift, we approximated the signals
with third-order polynomials using the polyfit Matlab function,
and extracted their residuals. Finally, we smoothed the signals by
downsampling them by a factor of 1000.

Coding and Measures
Data Extraction
Using Elan software (Wittenburg et al., 2006), we extracted and
annotated all question and answer sequences in the data, excluding those that exhibited laughter or coughing by a participant.
Wh-questions were identified on the basis of the presence of
interrogative pronouns or adverbs in the utterance. Polar questions were identified on the basis of their syntactic properties
(i.e., subject-verb inversion) or final intonation contour (i.e., lowrising, high-rising, or rising-falling-rising). Question and answer
sequences were first identified by an assistant unaware of the purposes of the study. The first two authors then checked whether the
cases identified by the assistant complied with the criteria mentioned above and only retained those that did (n = 171). Each
dyad contributed between 15 and 30 question-answer sequences

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 137

Torreira et al.

(mean = 21.6) to the dataset. Each speaker contributed between
4 and 26 answers to the dataset (mean = 12.9, SD = 5.9). The
first author then marked the beginning and end of each question and answer. At the phonetic level, the beginning and end
of answers and questions were located with reference to acoustic
events in the signal attributable to either a lexical item or a particle (e.g., uhm, uh). Mouth noises, clicks and breathing noises
were therefore not treated as part of the questions and answers.
The beginning of the question was located with reference to
syntactic structure (e.g., wh-words). The end of the answer was
placed at the first pause that coincided with points of completion
both at the syntactic and intonational levels. All answers therefore
consisted of at least one syntactically and intonationally coherent phrase. We also coded the preference status of all answers in
our data. We coded as preferred responses all responses to polar
questions that matched them in polarity (e.g., yes answers in the
case of polar affirmative questions), and answers to wh-questions
that provided the requested information. Dispreferred responses
included all other types of responses (e.g., negative answers to
polar affirmative questions, responses to wh-questions in which
the responder acknowledged not knowing the relevant answer).
We then displayed the breathing signals aligned with the audio
signals in ELAN software. For each question-answer sequence,
we identified inbreaths (i.e., rising trajectories of the breathing
signals) only if they started after the beginning of the question
and before the answer (n = 91; 53.2%), since inbreaths that
started before the question could not have been produced in
response to it. The shape of answerers’ breathing signals in the
considered interval showed considerable variation, and, in this
respect, contrast with the breathing patterns described in studies based on highly-controlled speech. The signals could be flat
with a final inbreath, but also falling or rising (i.e., indicating
exhalation or inhalation), or exhibit a mixture of the preceding
types (e.g., initially falling or rising, then flat, and then rising in
a final inbreath). Moreover, it is probable that a number of the
inbreaths that fell in the considered time interval were not primarily designed for speech. They could instead have been part
of initially vital or partly vital breathing cycles that happened to
occur in overlap with the question and preceding the answer.
Although prototypical vital and speech breathing cycles differ
very clearly under highly-controlled conditions (vital cycles are
said to be more symmetrical than speech cycles, i.e., with more
equal inhalation and exhalation phases; McFarland, 2001), many
of the breathing cycles in our spontaneous speech data had shapes
that could not be straightforwardly attributed to speech preparation or vital breathing mechanisms. Given the rapid alternation
of turns of uncertain length in conversation, speakers may use
different strategies to preserve sufficient lung air for speaking:
For example, they may take precautions to breathe early, they
may halt exhalation, or they may fall back on interruption of their
production to breathe midway (cf. Bailly et al., 2013, for an illustration of different types of breathing behavior in collaborative
reading). Because such strategies could not always be identified
in a straightforward way, we decided not to classify the inbreaths
in a qualitative way. Instead, we looked for meaningful quantitative trends in the data, while keeping in mind that different kinds
of breathing behaviors were present in it.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Breathing for answering

Inbreath Annotation
The onset and offset of each annotated inbreath was marked at
the signal minimum and maximum by an assistant unaware of
the purpose of the study. In some cases where there was a low
plateau, the onset was located at the “elbow” located at the end of
the plateau rather than at the absolute minimum. We also measured the amplitude of each inbreath, and later converted this
measure to speaker-normalized z scores for statistical purposes
(note that, since we were not particularly interested in absolute
kinematic values, we did not calibrate the Inductotrace instruments). Since the amplitude values in our data are approximately
normally distributed, the normalized amplitude range for each
speaker should roughly extend from −2 to 2 (excluding outliers).
Figure 2 illustrates our measurement scheme. From the initial
timing measurements, we computed the time alignment of the
beginning of the answerer’s inbreath relative to the end of the
question (inbreath latency from now on), and also to the start of
the answer. Finally, we computed the duration of the answer, and
its latency relative to the end of the question (answer latency).

Statistical Procedure
In order to investigate statistical relationships between variables
of interest, we fit mixed-effects regression models using the lme4
R package (Bates et al., 2014), and perform model comparisons
using the anova() function in R (R Core Team, 2014). We compare null models (including only a fixed intercept and random
intercepts for each speaker), reduced models (also including any
relevant covariates that may explain part of the variability of the
response variable, such as the preference status of the response
and the presence of disfluencies), and a full model with an added
fixed predictor term for the main independent variable of interest
in the analysis (e.g., answer duration in the analysis of the occurrence of pre-utterance inbreaths). In cases in which a reduced
model does not improve the fit of the null model (α = 0.05), we
compare the full model directly to the null model. In all models,
we include interactions between the random factor speaker and
any fixed predictors only if the interaction is statistically significant in a separate model comparison. Notice, however, that none
of them affected the coefficients of the other factors in the model
in a major way. For this reason, and for the sake of simplicity, we
do not discuss them in the results section.

Results
In this section we present several statistical analyses aimed at
addressing the following research questions regarding the planning of verbal responses in spontaneous conversation (corresponding results sections below between brackets):
(a) Are the characteristics of pre-utterance inbreaths related
to the scope of language planning? (Sections Pre-utterance
Inbreaths and Answer Duration, and Inbreath Characteristics and Answer Duration).
(b) Are responses preceded by an inbreath delayed with respect
to end of the interlocutor’s turn compared to responses spoken on residual breath? (Section Pre-utterance Inbreaths and
Answer Latency).

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 138

Torreira et al.

Breathing for answering

Inbreath Characteristics and Answer Duration

40

60

80

100

We then examined if, within the group of answers preceded by
an inbreath, answer duration was related to inbreath depth (in
speaker-normalized z-scores) and inbreath duration (in seconds;
mean = 0.887 s, median = 0.72 s). We first fitted reduced models with inbreath depth and inbreath duration as responses, and

20

As mentioned above, only 53.2% of the answers to questions were
preceded by an inbreath. We first examined whether the presence or absence of pre-utterance inbreaths is related to the duration of the answer. Because pre-utterance inbreaths could also be
affected by the preference status of the answer, and by the presence of disfluencies in the answer, we first fit two reduced logistic
mixed-effects regression models with either of these two variables
as fixed predictors, speaker as a random factor, and the presence
of a pre-utterance inbreath as the response. The preference status
of the answer did not significantly improve the fit of a null model
(p = 0.52), and was therefore dropped from subsequent analyses.
On the other hand, the presence of disfluencies in the answer provided a highly statistically significant improvement over the null
model [χ2(1) = 17.21, p < 0.0001], indicating that pre-utterance
inbreaths are more likely before answers containing one or more
hesitations. Interestingly, a model including the presence of disfluencies in the answer plus answer duration compared favorably
to a model including the presence of disfluencies only [χ2(1) =
6.38, p < 0.05], and indicated that pre-utterance inbreaths are
more likely the longer the answer [β = 0.35, z = 2.31, p < 0.05].
This is illustrated in Figure 3, which shows the percentage of preutterance inbreaths as a function of answer duration. It should be
noted that in the full model the β coefficient for the presence of
disfluencies in the answer was not statistically significant from 0
(β = 0.76, z = 1.78, p = 0.07), perhaps due to the fact that
this variable and answer duration, the other fixed predictor, were
moderately correlated (r = 0.59). In the same way, adding the
presence of disfluencies in the answer to a model with answer
duration as the only fixed predictor did not result into a statistical

% OF PRE-UTTERANCE INBREATHS

Pre-Utterance Inbreaths and Answer Duration

improvement [χ2(1) = 3.24, p = 0.07]. Thus, the relationship
between answer duration and pre-utterance inbreaths cannot be
explained away by the correlation between answer duration and
the presence of disfluencies in the answer. Instead, it appears that
answer duration is a better predictor of whether a pre-utterance
inbreath is present than the fluency of the answer.

0

(c) What is the most common timing of pre-utterance inbreaths
relative to the end of the interlocutor’s turn? (Section Timing
of Answerer’s Inbreaths Relative to Question Ends).

[0.162,0.416]

(0.416,0.81]

(0.81,1.38]

(1.38,2.67]

(2.67,9.4]

ANSWER DURATION (s)

FIGURE 3 | Percentage of pre-utterance inbreaths as a function of
answer duration (s) for five quantiles of approximately equal size
(n = 35 for the lowest quantile, and n = 34 for all other quantiles).

Question

Answer
Inbreath
Inb
th
amplitude
Inbreath
Inbrea
Inb
th
ons ffse
onset/offset
onset/

FIGURE 2 | Illustration of our measurements in a question and answer sequence exhibiting an inbreath before the answer.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 139

Torreira et al.

Breathing for answering

either the preference status of the answer or the presence of
disfluencies in the answer as fixed predictors, and observed that
none of the fixed predictors was statistically related to any of the
two responses (p > 0.05 in all comparisons with a null model).
Adding answer duration to the null models did not improve
its fit either for neither of the two response variables [inbreath
duration: χ2(1) = 0.16, p = 0.69; inbreath depth: χ2(1) = 0.2,
p = 0.64]. Moreover, visual inspection of the data indicated that
this lack of statistical relationships was not due to outliers. Thus,
contrary to previous findings (Winkworth et al., 1995; Whalen
and Kinsella-Shaw, 1997; Fuchs et al., 2013), we did not observe
any statistical relationship between utterance duration and the
amplitude and duration of pre-utterance inbreaths.

Pre-Utterance Inbreaths and Answer Latency

Timing of Answerer’s Inbreaths Relative to
Question Ends
Figure 5 shows a histogram of the timing of answerer inbreaths
relative to question ends. The mean and median of this measure were respectively −309 and −56 ms. Fitting the data with
a continuous density function in R, the mode of the distribution
was estimated at 15 ms, that is, briefly after the end of the question. The example in Figure 2, in which the answerer’s inbreath
is aligned close to the end of the question, is therefore representative of the most frequent cases in our data. However, there were
also cases with much earlier timings, sometimes with inbreaths
starting a second or more in advance of the question end. Individual inspection of such cases suggested that some of them may
not have been primarily designed for speech. For instance, some
of these early inbreaths were produced immediately after the end
of a long turn, and were therefore likely to be conditioned more
by the previous than the upcoming utterance (i.e., the answer to
the question).
TABLE 1 | Mean and standard deviation (SD), median, and estimated
modal answer latencies relative to question ends for answers preceded
and not preceded by an inbreath.
Answer latency
Mean (SD)

Median

Estimated mode

No inbreath

459 (659) ms

347 ms

100 ms

Inbreath

998 (1008) ms

823 ms

576 ms

15
10

Frequency

3
2

5

1
-1

0

0

ANSWER LATENCY (s)

20

4

25

5

The main question that we wanted to answer in this study
concerns whether answerers produce inbreaths in anticipation
of question ends in order to produce answers without substantial delays (compared to answers not preceded by a preutterance inbreath), or if pre-utterance inbreaths occur close to
turn ends, rendering responses later than those without preceding inbreaths. In order to investigate this, we first fitted reduced
regression models with answer latency as the response, and either
the preference status of the answer or the presence of disfluencies in the answer as a fixed predictor. None of these factors
improved the null model (p > 0.05 in both cases). Because longer
answers may take longer to plan, we also fitted a reduced model
with answer duration as the fixed predictor. In this case, there
was a statistical improvement over the null model [χ2(1) = 4.61,
p < 0.05]. Interestingly, adding the occurrence of a pre-utterance
inbreath greatly improved the fit of the model [χ2(1) = 11.2,
p < 0.001]. As illustrated in Figure 4, answers preceded by
an inbreath were substantially more delayed with respect to the
end of the question than answers not preceded by an inbreath.

The mean, standard deviation, median, and estimated mode for
answers preceded and not preceded by an inbreath are shown in
Table 1 (the mode of answer latency and other continuous variables was estimated with the function density() in R set to default
parameters).

-2

-8
n=80

n=91

INBREATH

NO INBREATH

FIGURE 4 | Boxplots of answer latency (s) as a function of the
presence of a pre-utterance inbreath.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

-6

-4

-2

0

2

4

INBREATH START TO QUESTION END (s)

FIGURE 5 | Density plots of answerers’ inbreath timings relative to
question ends (s).

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 140

Torreira et al.

It is possible that inbreaths that are intended as semiotic signals, for instance announcing an upcoming dispreferred or disfluent answer, may tend to be produced in the clear rather than
in overlap with the interlocutor’s turn end. To investigate this, we
fitted regression models with the distance from inbreath start to
question end as the response, and either the preference status of
the answer or the presence of disfluencies in the answer as fixed
predictors. None of these two predictors provided an improvement over the null model (p > 0.5 in both cases). It therefore
appears that the clustering of inbreath starts close to question
ends is not related to the preference status or the fluency of the
response.
In our data, therefore, the most typical timing of inbreaths, as
captured by median and modal values, is strikingly close to the
question end. This finding suggests that answerers tend to coordinate the onset of their vocal behavior, in this case an inbreath,
with the end of their interlocutors’ turn. However, we need to
rule out an alternative interpretation, namely that the frequent
alignment of inbreaths with question ends was simply caused
by our annotation criteria. Recall that we annotated answerer’s
inbreaths only if they occurred between the beginning of the
question and the beginning of the answer, that is, if they occurred
either in overlap with the question or during the question-answer
transition (see Figure 2 above). In a scenario in which the timing of inbreaths is random and the duration of the considered
time interval is constant, we would expect a uniform distribution of inbreath timings throughout the considered time interval.
However, because the considered time interval in our data was
variable, it was not possible to determine the expected distribution of inbreath timings under the random timing hypothesis
in a straightforward way. In order to estimate such distribution,
we generated 1000 distributions of random inbreath timings
within the considered time intervals in our data, and compared

Breathing for answering

them with the observed distribution of inbreath timings. Because
the minimum inbreath duration in our data was 210 ms, we
allowed the random inbreath timings to occur randomly anywhere between the beginning of each question in the data, and
210 ms before the beginning of its answer.
Figure 6 shows 1000 overlaid density plots representing the
randomly generated distributions (thin solid lines), along with
the observed distribution (dashed line). On visual inspection, the
distributions of random timings appear to have lower measures
of central tendency than the observed distribution. In fact, all of
the medians of the random-timing distributions were lower than
the observed mode; all of the modes of the random-timing distributions were lower than the observed mode; and only 35 out
of the 1000 means of random-timing distributions were equal
or higher than the observed mean. Based on these proportions,
the estimated probabilities that the observed median, mode, and
mean were generated by a distribution of random timings are
very low (i.e., median: p < 0.001; mode: p < 0.001; mean:
p < 0.035). This suggests that the frequent alignment between
answerer inbreaths and question ends observed in our data is
unlikely to be random, and that it is likely to be a genuine index
of coordination between questioners and answerers.

Discussion
Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, answerers’
breathing behavior in question-answer sequences in conversation is related to answer length, and this relationship cannot be explained by either the preference status of the answer
or the presence of disfluencies occurring in the answer. Long
answers have a greater probability of being preceded by an
inbreath than short answers. In contrast, we did not find any
relation between answer length and inbreath characteristics

FIGURE 6 | Density plots of answerers’ inbreath timings relative to question ends. The dashed curve represents the distribution in our data (see Figure 5),
while the overlaid thin lines represent randomly generated distributions.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 141

Torreira et al.

such as duration and amplitude, as reported in previous studies (Winkworth et al., 1995; Whalen and Kinsella-Shaw, 1997;
Fuchs et al., 2013; Rochet-Capellan and Fuchs, 2013). Note,
however, that Winkworth et al. (1995), who, like us, studied
spontaneous conversations, pooled turn-internal inbreaths and
inbreaths at turn transitions together, whereas we focused on
question-answer sequences always involving a predictable floor
transfer.
Second, answer latencies are significantly longer when an
inbreath precedes the answer. The most frequent timing for
answers preceded by an inbreath was around 600 ms after the
question end, while the most frequent timing for answers not preceded by an inbreath was 100 ms. Third, we found that, despite
significant variability in the data, there was a clear tendency
for answerers to inhale briefly after the end of their interlocutors’ questions, with an estimated modal offset of 15 ms. We
have also shown that this tendency is not merely a chance outcome due to the durational properties of the question and answer
sequences in our data. Interestingly, this finding appears to be
congruous with earlier findings by McFarland (2001) and RochetCapellan and Fuchs (2014). McFarland (2001) studied breathing
kinematics in a number of conditions, including unscripted dialogue. Using a cross-correlation method, he observed that turn
exchanges were associated with a high number of significant correlations between the breathing signals of the conversation participants. These correlations were sometimes negative, indicating
an anti-phase coupling, and sometimes positive, indicating an inphase relationship. Rochet-Capellan and Fuchs (2014), also using
spontaneous conversation data, did not observe a general interpersonal coordination of breathing behavior over whole conversations, but did observe specific coordinative patterns in shorter
time-windows when participants exchanged turns. Although we
have not examined the breathing behavior of questioners in our
data, it is reasonable to assume that they often took an inbreath
soon after finishing their turns. Since answerers in our data
tended to inhale close to the end of questions, it is quite plausible that the breathing cycles of questioners and answerers often
were in an in-phase relationship within the temporal region of
the turn transition.
Our analysis of preference revealed that this factor was
not a major source of variability in the breathing behavior of
responders in our data. This stands in contrast with the findings of Kendrick and Torreira (2015), who found that dispreferred responses in a corpus of telephone calls tend to be
preceded by an inbreath more often than preferred responses.
This is perhaps due to the fact that the present study considered all pre-utterance inbreaths registered through inductive plethysmography, whereas Kendrick and Torreira could
only have access to those that were audible in their acoustic
data. Another possible explanation is that Kendrick and Torreira focused on a restricted number of conversational actions
(responses to invitations, offers, and requests) that could take
on variable linguistic forms, whereas we focused on specific
linguistic forms (polar and wh-questions as defined in section
Coding and Measures) that accomplished an unspecified number of actions. Finally, it is also possible that inbreaths often
act as preference markers in telephone conversations, but not

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Breathing for answering

in face-to-face interactions. In telephone conversations, interactants do not see each other, and can only use acoustic information in order to communicate. Moreover, since speakers in
telephone calls typically hold their telephones close to their lips
and ears, subtle mouth noises such as inbreaths and clicks may
be more efficient communicative signals in telephone calls than
in face-to-face conversation.
We turn now to the interpretation of our findings. The main
goal of this study was to evaluate two competing hypotheses concerning the most typical time course of language planning and
production during conversational turn-taking. A model in which
the articulation of one’s turn relies on early prediction of turn-end
timing and disregards turn-final cues (cf. De Ruiter et al., 2006)
posits that listeners typically estimate the end of the incoming
turn well in advance of the turn end (i.e., over 500 ms; Magyari and de Ruiter, 2012, and that they plan and launch their
response in anticipation of that predicted time point. If we take
into account that pre-utterance inbreaths usually last several hundred milliseconds (over 800 ms on average in our data), this
model predicts that listeners will produce them in overlap with
the incoming turn, so as to be able to start speaking close to the
estimated turn end. On the other hand, a model consisting of
early planning of content and late triggering of articulation based
on turn-final cues, as discussed in Heldner and Edlund (2010),
predicts that listeners will produce pre-utterance inbreaths close
to the end of the interlocutor’s turn, and that answers preceded
by an inbreath will be delayed compared to answers produced on
residual breath. Our data collected via inductive plethymosgraphy indicate that the most typical moment in which responders
take a pre-utterance inbreath is briefly after the end of the question, not several hundred milliseconds in advance of its end. As
a consequence of this, answers preceded by an inbreath were
delayed relative to answers which were not. Our findings thus
favor a model based on early prediction of content plus late triggering of articulation based on information present close to turn
ends. Although we cannot discard the possibility that interlocutors use projection of turn-end timing in specific situations, our
observational data suggest that late launching of vocal behavior is
a more common strategy.
Since activation of the internal intercostal muscles, which are
usually involved in breathing activity, requires minimally 140 ms
(Draper et al., 1960), and inbreaths typically occur a few ms
after the question end, we can infer that inbreath preparation for
answers most often starts during the last syllable, word, or foot of
the question, where phrase-final prosodic cues (e.g., final lengthening, final pitch accents, and boundary tones in a language like
Dutch) and possibly other phonetic cues to turn ends (Local and
Walker, 2012) become manifest. Interestingly, answers not preceded by an inbreath most frequently occurred 100 ms after the
end of the question. Allowing for a minimal vocal response time
of 210 ms (Fry, 1975), it can be surmised that the articulation
of such answers is launched roughly at the same time as preutterance inbreaths when these are present. Our data therefore
suggest that the launching of physical responses at turn transitions, either in the form of pre-utterance inbreaths or speech
proper, typically occurs in reaction to information present in the
last portion of the interlocutor’s utterance. Figure 7 shows two

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 142

Torreira et al.

Breathing for answering

No inbreath before answer:
Typical answer latency:
100 ms

Minimal speech latency: 210 ms
Fry (1975)

Inbreath present before answer:
Typical answer latency:
576 ms

Typical inbreath latency:
15 ms

Minimal latency for internal intercostals activation: 140 ms
Draper et al. (1960)

Time
FIGURE 7 | Schematic illustration of two typical time courses of vocal behavior in question-answer sequences, along with minimal response latencies
reported in previous literature.

typical time courses for vocal responses to a question in schematic
form.
The fact that answerers tend to inhale more often before long
answers, together with the typical alignment of inbreaths with
question ends, implies that some amount of conceptual planning involving the size of the answer must already take place
in overlap with the incoming question. This finding is consistent with recent EEG evidence that response preparation starts
well in overlap with the incoming turn (Bögels et al., 2014). The
claim that production planning significantly overlaps with comprehension processes is nevertheless puzzling, because it implies
dual tasking using much of the same neural circuitry (e.g., Indefrey and Levelt, 2004; Menenti et al., 2011; Hagoort and Indefrey,
2014) and an intensive sharing of attentional resources (cf. Jongman et al., 2015). One can only speculate about how this may be
possible, for example, by a rapid switching of resources between
the two processes, with a gradual increase of allotted time-share
to production.
The considerations on the time course of language production in conversational turn-taking presented above are based on
the most typical values observed in our data, and on minimal
response latencies reported in previous research. Importantly,
however, we also observed a significant amount of variability
in breathing and answer latencies, with relatively long overlaps
and gaps accounting for a substantial portion of the data. Under
the two-stage production mechanism outlined above (i.e., early
planning of content overlapping with the interlocutor’s turn, plus
late launching of articulation based on incoming turn-final cues),
such non-smooth turn transitions require further explanation.
Such cases could arise when either early language planning or the

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

launching of articulation based on turn-final cues are not carried
out optimally. For instance, one common cause of speech overlap routinely mentioned in the Conversational Analysis literature
(e.g., Jefferson, 1986) is that turns may contain several potential
ends (i.e., transition relevance points, or TRPs) within them (e.g.,
“Are you coming later? To the party?”), and that listeners may
time their turn with respect to one of the non-final possible turn
ends (e.g., the word “later” in the previous example). Launching
articulation without waiting to hear a silence at the end of the
interlocutor’s turn is, in fact, what our data suggest, and what our
model predicts.
In cases of long inbreath latencies, the responder may not
have been able to plan the initial stages of her turn (e.g., conceptual planning) early enough to determine whether she needs
to take an inbreath before her turn, and launch it in response
to the interlocutor’s turn-final cues. This may be due to a low
attentional level on the part of the speaker, or to the interlocutor’s turn being unclear until its very end. In cases in which
the speaker is able to complete the initial stages of language
production in time to provide a smooth response, but not the
later stages (e.g., phonological encoding of the beginning of her
turn), she could still take an early inbreath upon identification
of the turn-final cues in the interlocutor’s turn, and then use
her inbreath, which may stretch for several hundred milliseconds, as a buffer through which to complete the planning of the
utterance.
We hope to have shown that the study of breathing can shed
new and interesting light on the underlying mechanisms involved
in turn-taking. The current study is limited to question-answer
contexts in which answers are always produced in response to a

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 143

Torreira et al.

Breathing for answering

question. We think that our conclusions regarding the answerer’s
breathing behavior can be expected to be valid in turn-taking
contexts involving readiness to respond on the part of one of
the interlocutors. However, further research should explore other
conversational contexts in which floor changes may be optional
(i.e., end of conversational sequences), subject to increased competition for the floor (e.g., multi-party conversation) or involving
highly predictable first turns (cf. Magyari and de Ruiter, 2012),
since different production mechanisms might be used in different situations. It would also be interesting to relate the breathing
signal to other early signals of speech preparation obtained by
direct measurement of the vocal organs via ultrasound (Drake
et al., 2014; Palo et al., 2014; Schaeffler et al., 2014) or other

instrumental techniques such as electromagnetic articulography.
We believe this is a rich field that should be further explored.

References

Kendrick, K. H., and Torreira, F. (2015). The timing and construction of preference: a quantitative study. Discourse Process. doi:
10.1080/0163853X.2014.955997. [Epub ahead of print].
Levelt, W., Roelofs, A., and Meyer, A. (1999). A theory of lexical access in
speech production. Behav. Brain Sci. 22, 1–37. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X99
001776
Local, J., and Walker, G. (2012). How phonetic features project more talk. J. Int.
Phon. Assoc. 42, 255–280. doi: 10.1017/S0025100312000187
Magyari, L., and de Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.
00376
McFarland, D. H. (2001). Respiratory markers of conversational interaction. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 44, 128–143. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388
(2001/012)
Menenti, L., Gierhan, S., Segaert, K., and Hagoort, P. (2011). Shared language overlap and segregation of the neuronal infrastructure for speaking
and listening revealed by functional MRI. Psychol. Sci. 22, 1173–1182. doi:
10.1177/0956797611418347
Palo, P., Schaeffler, S., and Scobbie, J. M. (2014). “Pre-speech tongue movements
recorded with ultrasound,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar in
Speech Production (Cologne), 300–303.
R Core Team. (2014). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available online at:
http://www.R-project.org/.
Rochet-Capellan, A., and Fuchs, S. (2013). “The interplay of linguistic structure
and breathing in German spontaneous speech,” in Proceedings of Interspeech
2013, 1128–1132.
Rochet-Capellan, A., and Fuchs, S. (2014). Take a breath and take the turn:
how breathing meets turns in spontaneous dialogue. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B
369:20130399. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0399
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.2307/412243
Schaeffler, S., Scobbie, J. M., and Schaeffler, F. (2014). “Measuring reaction times:
vocalisation vs. articulation,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar
in Speech Production (Cologne), 379–382.
Schegloff, E. A. (2006). Sequence Organization in Interaction, Vol. 1. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, T., and Enfield, N. J. (2010). A coding scheme for question–
response sequences in conversation. J. Pragmat. 42, 2620—2626. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.002
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T.,
et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903
616106
Wells, B., and MacFarlane, S. (1998). Prosody as an interactional resource: turnprojection and overlap. Lang. Speech 41, 265–294.

Bailly, G., Rochet-Capellan, A., and Vilain, C. (2013). “Adaptation of respiratory patterns in collaborative reading,” in Proceedings of Interspeech (Lyon),
1653–1657.
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., and Walker, S. (2014). lme4: Linear mixedEffects Models Using Eigen and S4. R Package Version 1. Available online at:
http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4.Bögels.
Bögels, S., Magyari, L., and Levinson, S. C. (2014). “Neural correlates of speech
preparation in interactive turn-taking: An early start?” in Society for the Neurobiology of Language Meeting 2014 (Amsterdam).
Caspers, J. (2003). Local speech melody as a limiting factor in the turntaking system in Dutch. J. Phon. 31, 251–276. doi: 10.1016/S0095-4470(03)
00007-X
De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
Drake, E., Schaeffler, S., and Corley, M. (2014). “Articulatory effects of prediction during comprehension: an ultrasound tongue imaging approach,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar in Speech Production (Cologne),
98–101.
Draper, M. H., Ladefoged, P., and Whitteridge, D. (1960). Expiratory pressures
and airflow during speech. Br. Med. J. 1, 1837–1842. doi: 10.1136/bmj.1.51
89.1837
Duncan, S. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 23, 283–292. doi: 10.1037/h0033031
Fry, D. B. (1975). Simple reaction-times to speech and non-speech stimuli. Cortex
11, 355–360. doi: 10.1016/S0010-9452(75)80027-X
Fuchs, S., Petrone, C., Krivokapic, J., and Hoole, P. (2013). Acoustic and respiratory evidence for utterance planning in German. J. Phon. 41, 29–47. doi:
10.1016/j.wocn.2012.08.007
Griffin, Z. M., and Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychol. Sci.
11, 274–279. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00255
Hagoort, P., and Indefrey, P. (2014). The neurobiology of language beyond single
words. Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 37, 347–362. doi: 10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013013847
Heldner, M., and Edlund, J. (2010). Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversation.
J. Phon. 38, 555–568. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2010.08.002
Indefrey, P., and Levelt, W. (2004). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components. Cognition 92, 101–144. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2002.06.001
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on ‘latency’ in overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.
doi: 10.1007/BF00148125
Jongman, S. R., Roelofs, A., and Meyer, A. S. (2015). Sustained attention in language production: an individual differences investigation.
Q. J. Exp. Psychol. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2014.964736. [Epub ahead of
print].

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Acknowledgments
This work was supported by an ERC Advanced Grant (269484
INTERACT) to SL. We would like to thank Ronald Fischer, Mart
Lubbers, and Imke van Brink for their assistance during the collection and processing of the data. We are grateful to Marisa
Casillas and Sean Roberts for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. We are also grateful to the members of
the IFL and Dialogue projects at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics for extensive discussion of this work.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 144

Torreira et al.

Whalen, D. H., and Kinsella-Shaw, J. M. (1997). Exploring the relationship
of inspiration duration to utterance duration. Phonetica 54, 138–152. doi:
10.1159/000262218
Winkworth, A., Davis, P., Adams, R., and Ellis, E. (1995). Breathing patterns during spontaneous speech. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 38, 124. doi:
10.1044/jshr.3801.124
Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., and Sloetjes, H. (2006).
“ELAN: a professional framework for multimodality research,” in Proceedings of LREC 2006, Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation (Genoa).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Breathing for answering

Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Torreira, Bögels and Levinson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution
or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 284 | 145

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 12 March 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00250

The intersection of turn-taking and
repair: the timing of other-initiations
of repair in conversation
Kobin H. Kendrick *
Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Edited by:
Marcela Pena, Catholic University of
Chile, Chile
Reviewed by:
Pilar Prieto, Institució Catalana de
Recerca i Estudis Avançats –
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Asli Ozyurek, Radboud University
Nijmegen, Netherlands
*Correspondence:
Kobin H. Kendrick, Language and
Cognition Department, Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Wundtlaan 1, Nijmegen 6525 XD,
Netherlands
kobin.kendrick@mpi.nl
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences, a section of the
journal Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 16 October 2014
Accepted: 18 February 2015
Published: 12 March 2015
Citation:
Kendrick KH (2015) The intersection
of turn-taking and repair: the timing of
other-initiations of repair in
conversation.
Front. Psychol. 6:250.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00250

The transitions between turns at talk in conversation tend to occur quickly, with only a
slight gap of ∼100–300 ms between them. This estimate of central tendency, however,
hides a wealth of complex variation, as a number of factors, such as the type of
turns involved, have been shown to influence the timing of turn transitions. This article
considers one specific type of turn that does not conform to the statistical trend,
namely turns that deal with troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding, known as
other-initiations of repair (OIR). The results of a quantitative analysis of 169 OIRs in faceto-face conversation reveal that the most frequent cases occur after gaps of ∼700 ms.
Furthermore, OIRs that locate a source of trouble in a prior turn specifically tend to
occur after shorter gaps than those that do not, and those that correct errors in a prior
turn, while rare, tend to occur without delay. An analysis of the transitions before OIRs,
using methods of conversation analysis, suggests that speakers use the extra time (i) to
search for a late recognition of the problematic turn, (ii) to provide an opportunity for the
speaker of the problematic turn to resolve the trouble independently, and (iii) to produce
visual signals, such as facial gestures. In light of these results, it is argued that OIRs take
priority over other turns at talk in conversation and therefore are not subject to the same
rules and constraints that motivate fast turn transitions in general.
Keywords: conversation analysis, turn-taking, timing, delay, other-initiated repair, self-repair, preference

Introduction
In conversation opportunities to participate are organized by a system of turn-taking (Sacks et al.,
1974). The rules and constraints of the turn-taking system conspire to minimize the duration of
transitions between turns. But not all transitions are in fact minimal. The transitions before turns
that deal with troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding, known as other-initiations of
repair (OIRs; e.g., “what?,” “who?,” “what’d you mean?”), have been reported by Schegloff et al.
(1977) to be longer than those before other turns. How much longer, however, remains an open
question. The first goal of this investigation is therefore to verify and refine this observation though
a quantitative analysis of the timing of OIR, using responses to polar question as a point of comparison. Schegloff et al. (1977) argue that next speakers withhold OIRs to provide an opportunity for
current speakers to resolve the trouble via self-repair. Whether this exhausts the possible explanations for delay before OIR is unclear, however. The second goal of the investigation is therefore to
look inside the transition spaces before OIRs, using conversation-analytic methods to discover and
describe what speakers use them to accomplish. As background to this, I begin with a discussion of
the timing of turn-taking in general and the timing of OIR more specifically.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 146

Kendrick

The Timing of Turn-Taking
Previous research on the timing of turn-taking has shown that the
transitions between turns in conversation most frequently occur
with only minimal gaps and overlaps. First documented systematically in a series of meticulous conversation-analytic studies
(Jefferson, 1973, 1983a,b, 1984, 1986; Sacks et al., 1974), the timing of transitions between turns has subsequently been investigated primarily through quantitative methods. In general, quantitative studies have taken one of two approaches, either examining
all transitions within a corpus, irrespective of turn type (e.g.,
Wilson and Zimmerman, 1986; Heldner and Edlund, 2010), or
analyzing just one type of transition, that between questions and
answers (e.g., Stivers et al., 2009; Kendrick and Torreira, 2014).
A comparison between the timing of transitions between questions and answer and that of a random sample of transitions in
a corpus of Dutch conversation revealed no statistically significant difference (Stivers et al., 2009). This suggests that the timing
of question–answer sequences can be used as a proxy for a typical turn transition in conversation. The results of these studies
generally converge, indicating that the most frequent transitions
between turns occur with a slight gap (cf. Jefferson, 1984, p. 18),
on the order of 100–300 ms.
This estimate of central tendency has clear implications for
psycholinguistic models of turn-taking. As Levinson (2013)
points out, psycholinguistic research has shown that speakers
require a minimum of 600 ms to plan even a single word (e.g., in
a picture-naming task; Indefrey and Levelt, 2004; Indefrey, 2011).
Thus the average gap between turns does not provide enough
time for a speaker to prepare even a simple next turn. Therefore,
Levinson argues, next speakers must anticipate the ends of turns,
and begin to plan the next turn well before the current one is complete, in full agreement with arguments by Sacks et al. (1974) and
Schegloff (1987).
But an estimate of central tendency is by definition a simplification, a single value that ideally represents a more complex
distribution. Research has also examined sources of complex
and systematic variation in the timing of turn-taking, especially
in question–answer sequences. The language and culture of the
speakers, the deployment of gaze, and the type and modality
of the response all have been shown to influence the timing of
responses to polar questions (Stivers et al., 2009). Question type
is also relevant; responses to polar questions are generally faster
than responses to content questions (Strömbergsson et al., 2013).
Studies that explore variation in the timing of turn transitions are
important because they reminds us of the diversity of turn types
and hence turn transitions in conversation.

The Timing of Other-Initiations
At least one type of turn that does not conform to global generalizations about the timing of turn-taking has been identified in
the conversation-analytic literature. Turns that deal with troubles
of hearing or understanding prior turns (e.g., “what?,” “who?,”
“what’d you mean?”), referred to as OIRs, have been reported
to be systematically withheld (Schegloff et al., 1977). The transition between the turn that contains the trouble (e.g., an error or
a word the next speaker does not understand), referred to as the
trouble-source turn, and the other-initiation of repair has been

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing of other-initiations of repair

observed to be longer than other turn transitions (Schegloff et al.,
1977; Robinson, 2006).
Based on a systematic qualitative analysis, Schegloff et al.
(1977, p. 374) observed that OIRs “regularly are withheld” by
speakers and therefore “occur after a slight gap.” Although the
report includes numerous cases of OIRs that occur after a slight
gap (and many that do not), it leaves basic questions unanswered,
such as the frequency with which speakers withhold OIRs and the
durations of the gaps that precede them.
A second report of the phenomenon, made in passing
by Robinson (2006, p. 153), contains more detailed information. Based on 32 cases of OIR in telephone conversations,
Robinson observed that the median delay was between 0.1 and
0.2 s. This finding is not conclusive, however, for two reasons.
The first concerns the method of timing. Rather than measure the duration of gaps and pauses objectively (e.g., using
a computer), conversation analysts typically employ a relative
method of timing, one that reflects the analyst’s perception
of time (Hepburn and Bolden, 2013), a method that has been
shown to overestimate objectively measured time systematically
(Roberts and Robinson, 2004; Kendrick and Torreira, 2014). The
second issue is the lack of an explicit comparison between the
timing of OIRs and the timing of other turns in the same conversations. To conclude that OIRs are delayed systematically,
one must establish not only that gaps before them are long,
but more importantly that they are longer than gaps before
other turns. Thus while Robinson’s finding supports the claim
by Schegloff et al. (1977), the frequency with which speakers do
or do not withhold OIRs and the precise timing of the gaps that
precede them remain open questions.

The Practices of Other-Initiation
The observation of systematic variation in the timing of turn
types (e.g., responses to questions, noted above) points to further
questions. Is variation in the timing of OIRs also systematic? Do
different types of OIRs, like different types of responses to questions, tend to occur after relatively shorter or longer transitions?
The inventory of OIR practices in English is relatively well
described (see Schegloff et al., 1977; Benjamin, 2013; Kitzinger,
2013; Kendrick, in press). A basic distinction is made between
OIRs that pinpoint a specific source of trouble in a prior turn
and those that do not. Open OIRs such as “what?” or “sorry?”
indicate that the speaker has encountered a trouble but do not
specify a particular source (Drew, 1997). In contrast, OIRs that
repeat all or part of a prior turn (e.g., “they’re what?”) or request
category-specific information (e.g., “who?”), among other possibilities, specifically locate the source of the trouble. According
to Schegloff et al. (1977), there is a preference for more specific
(‘stronger’) over less specific (‘weaker’) OIRs, such that speakers
should, for example, use a specific OIR over an open OIR if possible (cf. Svennevig, 2008). This raises the question of whether
the timing of open and specific OIRs differs systematically and
whether it provides evidence for or against the preference for
specificity.
A further distinction is whether an OIR constitutes a correction or not (Schegloff et al., 1977; Jefferson, 1987). An OIR
can proffer a replacement of a trouble source as a candidate

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 147

Kendrick

solution to a trouble of hearing or understanding (e.g., A: “she
got so mad.” B: “Pam’s mother?” A: “Mm hm.”). Or it can
assert a replacement as correction of an error (e.g., A: “she’s
eating the Butterworth diet.” B: “Butterfield.” A: “Butterfield.”).
Correction by someone other than the speaker of the error,
known as other-correction, has been argued to be a dispreferred
alternative to self-correction. Schegloff et al. (1977) observed that
other-corrections tended to exhibit special marking and special
positioning (e.g., the qualification of epistemic stance or delay
within a turn or sequence) that revealed them to be dispreferred
actions. But counter-examples to this generalization are not
uncommon (see, e.g., Jefferson, 1987, p. 87), and a recent survey
of other-correction in Finnish failed to identify special markings
of the type that Schegloff et al. described (Haakana and Kurhila,
2009). What, then, of the timing of other-corrections? Are the
transitions before other-corrections longer than other turns, as
their putative status as dispreferred actions predicts?

The Motivations for Delay Before
Other-Initiations
A final set of questions concerns the motivations for and consequences of delay before OIR. Conversation analysts have argued
that the timing of OIRs has a socio-interactional basis. A possible next speaker who encounters a problematic turn withholds an
OIR in order to provide the current speaker with an opportunity
to resolve the trouble on his or her own (Schegloff et al., 1977).
If a next speaker does not understand a question, for example,
he or she might not immediately reply with “what’d you mean?”
but might first wait for a moment to give the current speaker
an opportunity to repair the question independently, using practices of self-initiated repair. In this way, the self-initiation of
repair takes precedence over the other-initiation of repair, one
aspect of a principle known as the preference for self-correction
(Schegloff et al., 1977). The timing of the transition between a
trouble-source turn and an other-initiation of repair is thus seen
as a locus for the management of basic social relations, between
self and other.
But a priori one might propose complementary or alternative
explanations for the phenomenon of delay before OIR. The private processes that speakers necessarily engage in to hear and
understand a turn at talk occur in real time and, just like other
actions, take time to complete. The high frequency of transitions
with minimal gaps suggests that these processes very often occur
quickly. But might they not take longer under certain conditions,
say, when a next speaker has failed to hear, or understand a prior
turn? Is the delay before an OIR for the benefit of the speaker of
the trouble, to provide an opportunity for self-initiated repair, or
is it (also) for the benefit of the recipient of the trouble, to allow
a search for and a possible recovery of a hearing and understanding of the turn that may permit the sequence to move forward
without repair?
One might also look to the embodied actions of the participants for an explanation. The private processes that participants
engage in surely take time to complete, but so too do the physical actions they perform. A withdrawal of gaze from the speaker
of a trouble-source turn, a rotation of the head and body to
face a trouble-source speaker, a meaningful deployment of facial

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing of other-initiations of repair

muscles into a gesture of puzzlement—embodied actions such as
these all take time to produce. Through the filter of a text transcript, a silence between turns at talk, whether long, or short,
can look like an absence of action. But the long tradition of multimodal conversation analysis (Goodwin, 1980, 1981; Schegloff,
1998; Lerner, 2003; Mondada, 2006, 2007; Rossano, 2012; inter
alia) has shown that action does not necessarily end with a turn
at talk. What, then, do speakers do in the transition spaces before
OIR?

The Current Investigation
The current investigation combines conversation-analytic and
quantitative methods to address the following questions about the
timing of OIR.
(1) Are the transition spaces before OIRs systematically longer
than those before other turn types, such as answers to questions?
(2) Are the transition spaces before some types of OIRs systematically longer than those before other types?
(3) What are the motivations for the expansion of transition
spaces before OIRs? That is, what do speakers use the extra
time to accomplish?
The investigation uses conversation analysis to identify and
analyze OIRs and question–answer sequences, as well as to discover and describe a number of uses that speakers have for
the expanded transition spaces before OIRs. The measurements
of transition spaces and the comparisons of the distributions
are done quantitatively. At the end of the article I return to
the questions of the motivations for and consequences of delay
before OIRs and consider the relationship between repair and the
turn-taking system.

Materials and Methods
Data
The data for the investigation came from video-recordings of naturally occurring English conversation between friends and family
members engaged in a variety of activities (e.g., chatting, playing
games, preparing food, eating dinner). The corpus consisted of 19
recordings, with a total duration of 9 h and 20 min, and included
native speakers of English from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
Informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Identification of OIR
All cases of OIR were systematically identified in the corpus,
using the methods of conversation analysis and drawing on
previous research on OIR (Schegloff et al., 1977; Jefferson,
1987; Schegloff, 1992; Robinson, 2006; Egbert et al., 2009;
Robinson and Kevoe-Feldman, 2010; Benjamin and Walker,
2013). OIRs were distinguished from formally similar practices
that do not initiate repair as an action (see Schegloff, 1997, for
examples). It is well known that the practices of OIR can be
used to display surprise or ritualized disbelief (Selting, 1988;
Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2006). In the case of repeats of a

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 148

Kendrick

Timing of other-initiations of repair

trouble source, a clear boundary between such cases and those
that additionally or alternatively display surprise or disbelief has
not yet been identified in the literature. Such cases were therefore
included in the investigation. The types of OIRs identified
in the corpus are given in Table 1 along with examples (for
a more detailed report of the distribution of OIR in English
conversation, see Kendrick, in press). A total of 222 cases of OIR
were identified, for an average rate of one every 2.5 min.

Open and Specific OIRs
Other-initiations of repair differ in the specificity with which
they locate the source of trouble in the prior talk (Schegloff et al.,
1977). Open OIRs indicate that the speaker has encountered trouble with the prior talk but they do not specify a particular source
(e.g., “what?”; see Drew, 1997; Benjamin, 2013). In contrast, specific OIRs locate a particular component in the prior talk as the
trouble source (e.g., “who?” or “she did what?”). The practices
listed Table 1, other than those designated as open, were analyzed
as specific.

Candidate Repair Solutions and
Other-Corrections
Other-initiations of repair that include possible solutions to the
trouble differ in whether the solution is offered as a candidate
replacement of the trouble source or asserted as a correction
of the trouble source. These two alternatives are illustrated in
Extract (1) and Extract (2), respectively.
(1) Virginia
◦ Here you go◦
1 Wes:
2 Bet:
(But) she[: got so: ma:d.
3 Vir:
[◦ Thank you◦
4
(3.2)
5 Mom: -> Pam’s mother?
6 Bet:
Mm: hm
(2) RCE09
1 Ben:
2
3 Jam: ->
4
5 Ben:

She’s ea(h)ting the Butterwo(h)rth
di[e(h)t.
[Bu(h)tterfie(h)ld.
(0.9)
Butterfield.

In Extract (1) the other-initiation of repair “Pam’s mother?”
(line 5) is a candidate solution to the speaker’s trouble with the

reference “she” (line 2). The candidate is produced with rising
intonation, which qualifies the speaker’s epistemic stance. The
speaker thereby offers this as a possible, but not definitive, solution to the trouble. In contrast, the other-initiation of repair in
Extract (2) is produced with falling intonation and an accent
on the third syllable, through which the speaker asserts it as a
correction of the trouble source. The cases also differ in the epistemic status (Heritage, 2012) of the speakers. In Extract (1), the
mother has only indirect knowledge of the event reported in the
trouble-source turn, whereas the speaker in Extract (2) has direct
knowledge of the correct name.
This practice of other-correction has also been examined by
Jefferson (1987) under the rubric of ‘exposed correction,’ an
example of which occurs in Extract (3).
(3) Jefferson (1987:87)
1 Pat:
the Black Muslims are certainly more
2
provocative than the Black Muslims
3
ever were.
4 Jo: -> The Black Panthers.
5 Pat:
The Black Panthers.

To be analyzed as an other-correction, the OIR had to (i)
include a possible replacement for the trouble source, (ii) use
prosodic resources (an accented syllable and final falling intonation) to assert the replacement as definitive; and (iii) make
self-correction (not confirmation) conditionally relevant as a
response.

OIRs in and After Next Position
Although the majority of OIRs occur directly after the turn
at talk containing the trouble source, a minority of cases
occur after this next-turn position (Schegloff, 2000; Wong,
2000; Bolden, 2009; Benjamin, 2012). A distinction between
these two positions is crucial for the present investigation
because only OIRs in next position to the turn-constructional
unit (TCU; Sacks et al., 1974) that contains the trouble-source
result in a transition that consist of a gap or overlap,
without intervening talk. The OIR in Extract (4) illustrates this
point.
(4) RCE01 09:56
1 Liz:
I don’t- (0.8) I don’t know whether to
2
get a maxi dress for my birthday.
3
(0.5)
4 Liz:
I’ve got one and it[’s k- just

TABLE 1 | Frequency and proportion of other-initiations of repair in a contiguous next position to trouble-source turn-constructional units (TCUs).
Type

Example

Frequency

Proportion %

Open

what?, huh?, pardon?, what’s that?, among others

53

31.0

Interrogative words

who?, when?, where?, and what with falling intonation

11

6.4

Repeats + interrogative word

A: A plastic bag if you could. B: A what? A: Plastic bag.

19

11.1

Full repeats

A: And we have things to finish. B: We have things to finish? A: That we started earlier.

9

5.3
11.7

Partial repeats

A: We could start a little school together. B: Little school? A: Yeah, like Angel was gonna do.

20

Candidate understandings

A: Nan’s birthday on Sunday. B: Norms? A: No, Shirley.

42

24.6

Corrections

A: Transforming Investments B: Translating Investments. Sorry. A: Translating Investments.

12

7.0

Other

I don’t know who that person is, who’s the guy, among others

5

2.9

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 149

Kendrick

5 Cha:
6 Liz:

Timing of other-initiations of repair

->

[What’s maxi.=Long?
Really long, yeah.

The other-initiation “What’s maxi.=Long?” (line 5) does not
occur directly after the TCU that contains the trouble source
“maxi” (line 2), but rather occurs after the speaker of the trouble source extends her turn with an additional TCU (line 4). The
duration of time between the end of the trouble-source TCU and
the beginning of the OIR does not constitute a inter-turn gap
because it includes intervening talk which affects the timing of
the OIR.
All cases of OIR were therefore analyzed for position, following Schegloff (2000), with the requirement that the OIR
be in a contiguous next position to the TCU containing the
trouble source. The boundaries of TCUs were identified as
points of syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic completion
(Ford and Thompson, 1996). A total of 51 cases (23% of all cases)
did not occur in next position under this definition and were
excluded from the analysis of timing.

Identification of Polar Questions
In addition to OIRs, responses to polar questions were also identified in the corpus for comparison. For each recording, a number of polar questions equal to the number of other-initiations
was identified, starting at the beginning of the recording. For
example, if 10 other-initiations were identified in a recording,
the first 10 polar question sequences were then taken from the
same recording. Polar questions were defined functionally to
include both syntactic questions (i.e., those with verb inversion)
and epistemic questions (i.e., statements about information in
the recipient’s epistemic domain, so-called B-event statements;
Labov and Fanshel, 1977).

Measurements and Statistics
The duration of turn transitions were measured from the
end of the TCU containing the trouble source to the beginning of the other-initiation of repair, excluding audible inbreaths. Measurements were made manually in ELAN 4.3.3
(Wittenburg et al., 2006) by listening to the audio recording and
inspecting the waveform. Two extreme outliers with gap durations greater than 3000 ms were excluded from the quantitative analysis, resulting in a final set of 169 cases. Because the
distributions of gap durations were found to deviate substantially from a normal distribution (with skewness and kurtosis
values of more than twice their respective standard errors), nonparametric significance tests were used. All statistical tests were
performed in R 2.14.0 (R Development Core Team, 2013) with
the wilcox_test() function in the coin package (Hothorn et al.,
2006).

Results
The Timing of Other-Initiations of Repair
The timing of an other-initiation of repair is the duration of the
transition space, measured in milliseconds, between the end of
the trouble-source TCU and beginning of the OIR (see Materials

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

and Methods). In Extract (5), the OIR at line 4 occurs after a
gap of 514 ms. Hereafter the transition spaces before OIRs are
reported in milliseconds in all transcripts, whereas others are
given as 10ths of seconds, the standard convention in conversation analysis.
(5) Virginia
1 Bet:
They said that Phillips got um (0.5) knee:
2
wa:lking dru::nk at the reception.
3
-> (514 ms)
4 Mom:
Who:?
5 Bet:
Phillips,

The density plots in this section present the durations of
the transitions between trouble-source TCUs and OIRs along
the x-axis. Positive values constitute gaps and negative values
are overlaps. The density curves represents estimates of the frequency of cases with a given transition time. The peak of the
curve corresponds to an estimate of the mode of the distribution.
A comparison between the timing of OIRs and responses
to polar questions is presented first (see OIRs and Responses
to Polar Questions), after which two comparisons within OIR
types are presented: open versus specific (see Open and Specific
OIRs) and corrections versus non-corrections (see Corrections
and Non-Corrections).

OIRs and Responses to Polar Questions
Figure 1 presents a density plot of the gap durations for OIRs
(n = 169) and responses to polar questions (PRs; n = 169). An
inspection of the two distributions reveals that OIRs tend to occur
after significantly longer gaps that PRs. The mode gap duration
for OIRs is ∼700 ms, whereas the mode for PRs is roughly 300 ms.
A Wilcoxon Mann–Whitney Rank Sum Test confirms that the
distribution of OIRs tends to have larger values than that of PRs
(Z = 6.5228, p < 0.001, r = 0.5). Additional descriptive statistics
are given in Table 2.
The analysis of the timing of OIRs in general supports the conclusion that OIRs systematically occur after long gaps. The most
frequent OIRs do not occur within the same timing window the
most frequent PRs, between 0 and 500 ms, but few OIRs occur
after 1500 ms. Indeed, if one assumes that the timing of PRs serves
as a good proxy for a normal turn transition, as has been argued
(Stivers et al., 2009), then the analysis suggests that in this data
OIRs typically occur after 400–500 ms of delay beyond the 300 ms
duration of a normal transition space.

Open and Specific OIRs
The density plot in Figure 2 shows the distributions of gap durations for open (n = 53) and specific OIRs (n = 116) in next
position. The density curves indicate that the most frequent gap
duration for open OIRs is between 700 and 800 ms, in contrast
to approximately 400 ms for specific OIRs. A Wilcoxon Mann–
Whitney Rank Sum Test indicates that the two distributions differ
significantly (Z = 1.97, p < 0.05, r = 0.15). These results suggest
that on average speakers of open OIRs delay ∼300–400 ms more
than speakers of specific OIRs.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 150

Kendrick

Timing of other-initiations of repair

FIGURE 1 | Gap durations (in milliseconds) for other-initiations of repair (OIRs) and responses to polar questions.

TABLE 2 | Descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, and median in
milliseconds) for gap durations by type.
Mean (SD)

Median

N

Responses to polar questions

397 (475)

339

169

All OIRs

760 (532)

721

169

Specific OIRs

726 (568)

633

116

Open OIRs

835 (439)

787

53

Corrections

412 (422)

274

12

Non-corrections

787 (530)

744

157

Corrections and Non-Corrections
The frequency of other-corrections in the corpus was low, with
only 14 cases in total and only 12 cases in next position to
the trouble-source TCU (see Materials and Methods). Figure 3
presents a density plot for the gap durations of other-corrections
(n = 12) and all other OIRs (n = 157) in next position. An inspection of the density plot reveals that, although the number of cases
in the collection is small, other-corrections tend to occur earlier than OIRs in general. The most frequent gap duration for
other-corrections is between 200 and 300 ms whereas other OIRs
most frequently occur after ∼700–800 ms. A Wilcoxon Mann–
Whitney Rank Sum Test indicates that other-corrections tend to
have shorter gap durations (Z = −2.64, p < 0.01, r = 0.20). These
results suggest that in contrast to the bulk of other-initiations,
other-corrections do not occur after significant delay and in fact
occur within a similar temporal window as responses to polar
questions.

What do Speakers Use the Transition
Spaces Before OIRs to Accomplish?
The analysis of the timing of OIRs revealed that the most frequent cases occur after gaps of ∼700 ms, in contrast to 300 ms for
responses to polar questions. This observation raises the question

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

of what participants use this extra time to accomplish. A qualitative analysis of the transition spaces before OIRs points to three
possible answers. The speaker of an OIR, before its production,
can:
(1) perform a search for late recognition of the trouble-source
turn,
(2) provide an opportunity for the speaker of the trouble-source
turn to self-initiate repair, and
(3) produce visual signals, such as facial gestures, that display a
lack of recognition and thereby occasion—if not initiate—
self-repair.
As the analyses in this section make clear, these possibilities
are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Searching for Late Recognition
In order to produce a relevant next turn, a next speaker must
hear, and understand the current turn. The fact that next turns
frequently take only 100–300 ms to initiate suggests that the
procedure next speakers engage in to recognize the current
turn’s meaning and action typically occurs quickly, enabling
a minimization of gaps between turns (Levinson, 2013). But
recognition does not always occur so quickly and can in fact
come late, even after a next speaker displays a lack of recognition. This can be seen in the following cases, in which the
recognition of a prior turn occurs after the next speaker initiates
repair.
(6) RCE06
1 Alex:
2
3 Rob: ->
4 Alex:
5 Rob:

Did you like buy some lemonade earlier,
(937 ms)
Buy some what,=<lemonade,
(Yeah)
Yeah yeah yeah.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 151

Kendrick

Timing of other-initiations of repair

FIGURE 2 | Gap durations (in milliseconds) for open and specific OIRs.

FIGURE 3 | Gap durations (in milliseconds) for corrections and all other OIRs (non-corrections).

(7) Virginia
1
2
3
4
5
6

Wes:
Vir:
Wes:
Vir:

(Now) you taught ’er howda dance, didn’ you?
(1236 ms)
-> Huh? [ (.) [Yeah.
[Weren[’t you teachin’ er’ some new
steps the other day?
Y:eah.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

In the first case, Rob apparently fails to hear a word in Alex’s
question, evidenced by his OIR (“buy some what,”), which locates
“lemonade” as a trouble source and makes repetition of this word
by Alex conditionally relevant. But before Alex responds, Rob initiates self-repair, producing the very word he claimed, by virtue of
his OIR, not to have heard. The word is produced with a prosodic
practice known as a left push, noted by the “<” in the transcript,

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 152

Kendrick

Timing of other-initiations of repair

through which the speaker interdicts the relevance of transition
at the completion of a prior TCU (cf. Local and Walker, 2004).
Here the left-push is hearable as a ‘last millisecond’ effort to get
the word into the turn before the other responds. In the second
case, Virginia apparently fails to hear Wes’s question and initiates
repair with “Huh?.” Then, a moment later, after a micro pause of
140 ms, she answers the question in overlap with Wes’s self-repair,
claiming in effect to have heard the question, at least well enough
to confirm it. These cases suggest that in addition to a procedure that results in ‘immediate’ recognition of a current turn, next
speakers also have available a procedure that can result in ‘late’
recognition.
Although a search for late recognition is primarily a private process, observable behaviors, such a momentary withdrawal of gaze in the transition space, may reflect this process and thereby render it public. Psycholinguistic research has
shown that speakers often avert their gaze when asked questions
and that this in turn facilitates remembering and speech planning (Glenberg et al., 1998; Doherty-Sneddon and Phelps, 2005;
Markson and Paterson, 2009). Thus the withdrawal of gaze in the
transition space before a relevant next turn may be a public exponent of a private search for recognition, as is arguably the case
in the next extract. Here, after Heather initiates a new sequence,
assessing a taxi driver that she evidently hired the night before,
Kelly looks away from Heather in an expanded transition space,
apparently engaged in a search for recognition.
(8) RCE28
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

Hea:
->
Kel:
Hea:
Kel:
Hea:
Kel:

That taxi driver last night was really
friendly.
(1346 ms) ((see Figure 4))
What?
(0.6)
My taxi driver was really friendly.
(0.4)
OH, yea[h.
[yesterday.
(1.5)
I was like she took a while.

The reference to the taxi driver in Heather’s turn includes
a demonstrative (“that taxi driver”), signaling to Kelly that she
should be able to recognize the reference (Himmelmann, 1996).
At the completion of Heather’s turn, Kelly averts her gaze from
Heather and holds this position for ∼1100 ms (see Figure 4).
The timing of Kelly’s look away coincides with the recognizable
completion of Heather’s turn and thereby shows that Kelly has
heard the turn, at least well enough to identify a transition relevance place (Sacks et al., 1974; cf. Holler and Kendrick, 2015).
The look away also shows that Kelly has begun to act at just
the place where an action by her is relevant. In this way, the
withdrawal of gaze at a transition relevance place can be seen
as preparatory to an incipient response. In this case, however,
Kelly does not produce a relevant response, but rather returns
her gaze to Heather and initiates repair. One plausible account
of this behavior is that the withdrawal of gaze reflects a search
for recognition, one that evidently fails. A search for late recognition is thus one possible use that a next speaker can make of an

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

FIGURE 4 | Kelly looks away at the completion of the trouble-source
turn and holds this position for ∼1100 ms (top). She then returns her
gaze to Heather for ∼250 ms before she produces the OIR (bottom).

expanded transition space, one which, if successful, may obviate
the need for repair.

Providing an Opportunity for Self-Initiated Repair
An expansion of the transition space, whether the result of
a search for recognition or not, has as an interactional affordance the provision of an opportunity for the current speaker
to self-initiate repair and thereby potentially resolve the trouble (Schegloff et al., 1977). Indeed, the absence of a response
within a normal transition space can occasion a self-initiation
of repair by the current speaker, as can be seen in the following
extract.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 153

Kendrick

Timing of other-initiations of repair

(9) Monopoly Boys
1 Rick:
You have th:e thing I need for the mono:poly.
2
(540 ms)
3 Rick: -> Over there. ((points))
4
(438 ms)
5 Rick: -> The reds.
6 Luke:
Oh, yeah.

In the course of a game of Monopoly, Rick notices that Luke
has “th:e thing” (i.e., a specific property) that he needs in order
to have a monopoly in the game (i.e., to own all the properties of a specific color). At the word “thing” Luke can be seen
to begin a visual search of his properties (a set of cards on the
side of the game board) that continues into the transition space
after Rick’s turn. Rather than wait for Luke either to resolve the
reference himself or to initiate repair (e.g., with “what” or “what
thing”), Rich adds an increment to his turn, which, together with
a deictic pointing gesture, specifies the area in Luke’s visual field
he should search and thereby assists him in the resolution of
the problematic reference. After this, too, fails to secure recognition from Luke, Rick again initiates self-repair, replacing “th:e
thing” with “the reds” (i.e., the red colored properties), a form of
indexical repair that speakers can employ to pursue a response
(Bolden et al., 2012). With this, Luke is apparently able to resolve
the problematic reference and registers this change of state publicly with “oh” (Heritage, 1984) and confirms Rick’s noticing with
“yeah.”
Here, then, the self-initiation of repair by the current speaker
is an alternative to the other-initiation of repair by next speaker.
Luke uses the transition spaces that emerge in the course of
Rick’s turn to search for recognition, a search that, in this case,
is publicly observable. Before the search comes to an end, either
in late recognition or failure (i.e., an other-initiation of repair),
Rick uses the transition spaces as opportunities to self-initiate
repair. The practices that current and next speakers employ reveal
complementary orientations to their accountability for the intelligibility of the current turn (Garfinkel, 1967). Luke does not
initiate repair immediately; he withholds other-initiation to first
search for recognition independently. In this way, he holds himself accountable for the recognition of the current turn. Likewise,
Rick does not wait for Luke to initiate a repair procedure; he
self-initiates repair at the first sign that the recipient has failed to
recognize his turn (i.e., the expansion of the transition space and
the visible search). In so doing, he orients to his accountability for
the intelligibility of his own conduct.
If the current speaker passes on the opportunity to self-initiate
repair provided by an expansion of the transition space, the
necessity to find a resolution of the trouble falls to the next
speaker. That is, if the current speaker does not initiate self-repair,
the next speaker may resort to OIR, as Rich does in the next
extract.
(10) Coffee Chat (simplified)
1 Rich:
((clears throat))
2
(2.0)
3 Rich:
WE[:LL,
4 Tom:
[That’s in: building A?
5
(1286) ((see Figure 5))
6 Rich: -> Pardon?

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

FIGURE 5 | Rich, on the left, looks down during the trouble-source turn
(top). He then turns to look at Tom after the trouble-source turn is complete
and holds his gaze on Tom for ∼800 ms before he produces an OIR (bottom).

7 Tom:
8 Rich:

What building are you in?
Yeah: I’m on the second floor A building.

After a lapse in the conversation, in which Rich can be seen
to inspect his empty coffee cup, a possible warrant to leave the
table, Rich produces what can be heard as a preliminary to his
departure from the interaction (“WE:LL,” at line 4). In overlap
with this, Tom poses a question to Rich that continues on the
topic of the talk from before the lapse (i.e., who lives in the same
building as Rich in a retirement community). During the question, Rich looks down and forward. ∼300 ms after Tom’s question
comes to completion, Rich turns his head to the left to direct his
gaze at Tom (see Figure 5). He maintains this position, gazing at
Tom, for roughly 800 ms before he produces an OIR (“Pardon?”,
line 7).

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 154

Kendrick

Timing of other-initiations of repair

While the entire duration of the transition space before the
OIR constitutes an opportunity in which Tom could self-initiate
repair (e.g., by repeating his question), the roughly 800 ms
that Rich holds his gaze on Tom arguably constitutes a space
in which Tom should self-initiate repair. Heath (1984, p. 253)
has argued that gaze, as a display of recipiency, is “sequentially implicative” and “declares an interest in having some
particular action occur in immediate juxtaposition with the display.” In line with this, Rossano (2006) and Stivers and Rossano
(2010) have argued that participants use gaze to signal the relevance of a response. The withdrawal of gaze, in contrast, has
been associated with an absence of sequential implicativeness,
both at possible sequence completion (Rossano, 2012) and in
word searches (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1986). Thus although the
current speaker has an opportunity to self-initiate repair and
although the deployment of gaze by next speaker arguably displays an expectation that the current speaker should act, the
current speaker here passes on the opportunity to self-initiate
repair. The initiation of the repair procedure then falls to the next
speaker.

Producing Visual Signals
An expansion of the transition space before the production of
an OIR also provides space for, and can be the result of, a next
speaker’s production of visual signals and other visible bodily
actions. It has been shown that head movements, such as a lateral tilt or forward extension of the head, can serve to occasion
self-repair (Seo and Koshik, 2010) and that particular body movements frequently occur in repair sequences (Rasmussen, 2013;
Li, 2014; Floyd et al., in press). In addition, facial gestures, like
raising or furrowing one’s eyebrows, can be preliminaries to verbal OIRs. In the following extract, after Abbie turns to gaze at
Maureen, she raises her eyebrows and holds this position for
∼260 ms before she initiates repair with “Hm:?”
(11) Game Night
1 Abbie:
Apparently she’s a really spiritual person
2
with a lot of spirituality and stuff like
3
↑this..hh
4 Maureen: M.A.?
5
(714) ((see Figure 6))
6 Abbie: -> Hm:?
7 Terry:
Mm:hm[:,
8 Maureen:
[Is it M.A.?
9 Abbie:
Mm:.

The trouble source that Abbie’s OIR locates is itself an OIR
which locates the reference to “she” at line 1 as a trouble source
and offers the initials “M.A.” as a candidate replacement. Abbie’s
conduct in the transition space – directing her gaze to Maureen,
raising her eyebrows, and holding for a beat – not only provides
an opportunity for the self-initiation of repair but also constitutes a visible and accountable signal, in the form of a facial
gesture, that displays a lack of recognition and a state of recipiency. (Note that Abbie’s open OIR “hm:?” lacks the “astonished”
prosody associated with open OIRs that signal surprise; Selting,
1988.) In this case, the visual signal does not itself elicit a selfrepair; the next speaker goes on to produce a verbal OIR. But

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

FIGURE 6 | Abbie, in the middle, looks down during the trouble-source
turn (top) and then raises her eyebrows and turns to look at Maureen.
She holds this position for a beat (∼260 ms) before she produces an OIR
(bottom).

elsewhere such visual signals can prompt a current speaker to
self-repair his or her talk without a verbal OIR.
In the next extract, Heather self-repairs a place reference in
her answer to Kelly’s question after Kelly produces a facial gesture
that displays a lack of recognition. The question that Kelly asks
Heather concerns the amount of time that a friend of Heather’s
has lived in specific regions of England.
(12) RCE28
1 Kel:
It’s over ten years, that’s pretty much all::
2 Hea:
Yeah he went to my infant school and he went
3
to:: St. Jo:se:ph which is like the school in
4
hhh (0.8) well I think it- (.) counts as
5
Merrow.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 155

Kendrick

6
->
7 Hea:
8
9 Kel:

Timing of other-initiations of repair

(1350 ms) ((see Figure 7))
or like Guildford.=But it’s [still Surrey.
(0.2)
[((Kelly nods))
(Okay)

After some initial trouble with the place reference, Heather
offers “Merrow” as the name of a place where the friend has lived.
In a position in which acceptance of the answer is relevant (e.g.,
a sequence-closing third, see Schegloff, 2007), a gap of ∼840 ms
emerges, at which point Kelly produces a facial gesture – raising
her eyebrows and pulling down the corners of her mouth – displaying a lack of recognition (see Figure 7). Kelly holds this facial
gesture for ∼510 ms, until Heather self-repairs the place reference

from “Merrow” to “Guildford,” a nearby town. The reference to
“Guildford” is apparently recognizable to Kelly, who begins to
nod shortly thereafter, and after Heather offers “Surrey” as the
name of the county where both places reside, Kelly accepts the
answer as adequate and brings the sequence to a close (line 9).
This case demonstrates that a facial gesture by a possible next
speaker can be sufficient to occasion self-repair. The production
of a visual signal within the transition space before an OIR, such
as in Extract (11), could therefore be a practice for the resolution
of a trouble, one that may obviate the need for a verbal OIR1 .

Discussion
The Motivations for and Consequences of
Delay Before Other-Initiations of Repair
The quantitative analysis of the timing of OIRs in conversation confirms the observation that OIRs tend to occur after
expanded transition spaces. Indeed, if one assumes that the timing of responses to polar questions can serve as a proxy for a
normal turn transition, as others have done (Stivers et al., 2009),
then the results suggest that other-initiations typically occur after
400–500 ms of delay beyond the 300 ms duration of a normal
transition space. But why should this be so? The explanation put
forward by Schegloff et al. (1977), discussed previously, is that
next speakers who encounter troubles of speaking, hearing, or
understanding regularly withhold OIR to provide an opportunity for self-initiations of repair. The nature of this explanation
is unclear, however. Is this an explanation of a personal motivation for the delay? That is, does a next speaker withhold an OIR in
order to create an opportunity for the current speaker to resolve
the trouble? Or is this an explanation of a public consequence
of the delay, one that leaves the question of motivation unanswered? In principle, a delay before an OIR is an opportunity for
a self-initiation of repair, whatever its cause.
The analysis of what speakers use the transition spaces before
OIRs to accomplish suggests that providing an opportunity for
self-initiation of repair does not exhaust the set of possible
motives for delay. Although in some cases one can argue that such
a motive may lie behind the observed delay (see Providing an
Opportunity for Self-Initiated Repair), others point to alternative
explanations. The fact that next speakers who initiate repair do,
on occasion, recover all, or part of the trouble source after an OIR
demonstrates that ‘late’ recognition is possible. Together with
observations of subtle visible bodily actions, such as gaze aversion
in an expanded transition space, the qualitative evidence suggests
that next speakers who fail to hear or understand the troublesource turn can engage in a search for this late recognition (see

FIGURE 7 | After Heather’s answer to Kelly’s question is complete,
Kelly gazes at Heather and holds this position for ∼840 ms (top). She
then raises her eyebrows, pulls down the corners of her mouth, and holds this
facial gesture for ∼510 ms (bottom), until Heather produces a self-repair.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

1
An examination of visual signals that precede open OIRs – which have the longest
transition spaces on average and are therefore the most pertinent to the question
– revealed relevant visible bodily actions such as those described in this section
in 26.4% of cases (n = 14). However, the corpus is not well suited to a quantitative analysis of visible bodily actions. In some cases, the relevant participant is
off-camera or his or her face cannot be seen due to the angle of the camera, and
in many cases, the participant’s eyes cannot be seen well enough to measure his or
her gaze. A corpus specifically designed for the temporal analysis of gaze and gesture (e.g., Holler and Kendrick, 2015) is needed to analyze the visual signals that
precede OIRs quantitatively.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 156

Kendrick

Searching for Late Recognition). The motivation for the delay
in such cases is not to provide an opportunity for self-initiation
of repair, but more proximally to resolve the trouble independently, without recourse to an OIR that exposes the trouble and
stops the progressivity of the sequence. The evidence also suggests that the visual signals such as facial gestures can precede
verbal OIRs. These and other visible bodily actions, including
reorientations of the head and torso, take time to produce and
can cause a delay – measured in milliseconds of silence – before
an OIR. Here, too, the motivation for the delay does not directly
concern the self-initiation of repair.
But regardless of the motivation, the consequence is the same:
an expanded transition space before an OIR can be a covert
signal of trouble and can provide an opportunity for the current speaker to self-initiate repair. Although one can interpret
Schegloff et al.’s (1977) explanation as an account of a personal
motive, their commitment to uncovering abstract properties and
principles of interactional systems suggests that their target was
not the individual and his or her motives, but rather an orderliness that transcends such personal concerns. While the results of
the investigation are compatible with their explanation, research
on the timing of the self-initiation of repair, in particular socalled transition space repairs, is necessary to confirm it. The
model that Schegloff et al. (1977). propose predicts that transition space repairs should occur earlier in the transition space than
other-initiations. If so, it would provide evidence for a system in
which the temporal window for self-initiation precedes that for
other-initiation.
Although the results of the investigation are of primary relevance to models of turn-taking and repair in conversation analysis, they may also be of interest to psycholinguists, for whom the
timing of turn-taking presents a puzzle. Given that experimental research has shown that speakers need at least 600 ms to plan
even a simple word (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004; Indefrey, 2011),
processes of language production in conversation must begin well
before the current turn ends (Levinson, 2013). Psycholinguists
have thus begun to investigate the cognitive processes that enable
the minimization of gaps between turns (Magyari and de Ruiter,
2012; Magyari et al., 2014; Sjerps and Meyer, 2015). The results
of the current investigation, however, remind us that estimates
of central tendency hide a wealth of complex variation, as a
number of factors, such as the type of turns involved, influence the timing of transitions. To psycholinguists, the 700 ms
of silence that precedes OIRs might be taken to reflect a cognitive process – comprehension gone awry. Indeed, the search
for late recognition, as I have called it, may be just such a process. But in face-to-face conversation, the core ecological niche of
language (Schegloff, 2006), the line between cognitive processes
and socio-interactional ones is blurred. Visible bodily actions,
such as an aversion of gaze or a facial gesture, can render otherwise private processes public, at which point they may feed into
socio-interactional ones. Even timing alone – a recognition that
a speaker has not produced a turn when it was due – can occasion actions such as self-repair. In this way, the private and the
public are woven together in an interactional system, and it is
within such a system that the silence that precedes OIRs must be
understood.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing of other-initiations of repair

The Preferences for Self-Correction and
Specificity
The properties and principles of the repair system, Schegloff et al.
(1977) argued, maximize opportunities of self-initiated repair,
which come early, and often, and minimize opportunities for
other-initiated repair, which as we have seen tend to come late in
the transition space. This institutionalized bias in the repair system is known as the preference for self-correction. As evidence of
this, Schegloff et al. (1977, p. 379). claimed that other-corrections
exhibit special marking and special positioning (e.g., the qualification of epistemic stance or delay within a turn or sequence)
that orient to a dispreferred status. With respect to the position
of other-corrections within a turn, however, the current investigation finds no evidence for an orientation to dispreference. The
results of the analysis, while based on a small sample, show that
the other-corrections in the corpus tend to occur without delay,
most frequently after 200–300 ms. This suggests that speakers
do not withhold other-corrections to provide an opportunity for
self-correction. Moreover, the claim that other-corrections typically include qualifications or modulations of epistemic stance
has also recently been called into question (Haakana and Kurhila,
2009). Taken together, these findings cast doubt on the status of
other-correction as a dispreferred action and suggest that further
investigation, based on a larger sample of cases, is warranted.
The relevance of these results to the preference for selfcorrection itself is less clear. Other-corrections are relatively rare.
The entire corpus contains 222 other-initiations, including those
that occur after next position; only 6% (n = 14) of these are
other-corrections. This suggests that many opportunities that
speakers may have had to issue a correction simply were not
taken. Moreover, other-corrections appear to be restricted to specific types of trouble sources. Of the 14 cases of other-correction,
nine locate proper names, or numbers as trouble sources and
three target mispronunciations or malapropisms (e.g., “antioxidities” rather than antioxidants). In contrast, other practices for
other-initiation do not appear to be restricted in this way. Thus
although other-corrections may not be constructed as dispreferred actions (i.e., with delay or qualification), a restriction of
other-corrections to specific contexts may nonetheless be evidence of a systematic bias against their use.
In addition to the preference for self-correction,
Schegloff et al. (1977) also argue for a preference for specificity in the selection of OIR practices, such that more specific
(or ‘stronger’) other-initiations are preferred over less specific (or
‘weaker’) ones (cf. Clark and Schaefer, 1987). Two pieces of evidence are given to support this claim. First, if an other-initiation
is subject to self-repair within the same turn, the self-repair
occurs from a less to a more specific format, but not the inverse.
Second, if more than one other-initiation is needed to resolve
the trouble, speakers use increasingly specific practices. The
current investigation adds two additional pieces of evidence
for a preference for specificity. Third, specific other-initiations
are more frequent than open other-initiations (only 31% are
open, see Table 2; cf. Kendrick, in press). And fourth, specific
other-initiations tend to occur earlier in the transition space than
open other-initiations, in line with the tendency for dispreferred
alternatives to be delayed.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 157

Kendrick

The observation that some types of OIRs occur after less delay
than others also opens up new avenues for future research. Within
the diversity of specific OIRs, for example, one may discover systematic variation. The precise timing of an OIR could indicate
a particular epistemic stance, such as whether the OIR signals a
trouble of hearing or understanding per se, or whether it displays
a speaker’s surprise or disbelief (see Identification of OIR).

The Intersection of Turn-Taking and Repair
The model of turn-taking that Sacks et al. (1974) proposed
accounts for the minimization of gaps in conversation through a
set of rules and constraints that motivate fast transitions between
turns. Given that OIRs are themselves turns at talk, the observation that OIRs tend to occur after relatively long gaps would
therefore appear to undermine this model. In this section – an
exploration of the intersection of turn-taking and repair – I first
outline a series of systemic constraints on the timing of next turns
and then argue that OIRs supersede them, an argument first made
by Sacks et al. (1974) and Schegloff et al. (1977), but only partially
articulated in their work.
To begin, consider the initial boundary of the transition space.
The turn-taking system includes a constraint against more than
one speaker at a time, and while more than one speaker at a time
is common, it is an unstable state, one which quickly resolves
back to a single speaker (Schegloff, 2000). This accounts for the
observation that next turns tend to start up at or near possible
completions of prior turns, where transition can occur without
(or with minimal) violation of the constraint, not sooner.
At the final boundary of the transition space, there are at least
three constraints in operation, two of which are rooted in the
rules for turn allocation, which provide a motivation for fast transitions (Sacks et al., 1974). Roughly, if no one has been selected to
speak next (e.g., by an addressed question), a speaker may selfselect to take a turn. If more than one speaker self-selects, the first
to start has rights to the turn and the second starter should cede
the turn to the first. These rules establish a motivation for next
speakers to start up early and thereby minimizes the gaps between
turns.
If no one self-selects, however, the current speaker may continue his or her turn. The possibility that such a continuation
may be imminent also provides for the minimization of gaps, as
next speakers aim to begin before this occurs. Although the time
course of this rule is unknown, a computational corpus study of
Dutch telephone conversations by Bosch et al. (2005) provides
a useful estimate. The duration of silences between utterances
within a turn was found to be greater than the duration of silences
between turns, with mean durations of 520 and 380 ms, respectively. This is compatible with a model of turn-taking in which
an opportunity for self-selection by next speaker temporally precedes that for continuation by current speaker. The expanded
transition spaces before OIRs are therefore the result of a connivance: the next speaker passes the opportunity (or obligation, in
the case of current-selects-next) to speak, and the current speaker,
the one who produced the trouble source, passes the opportunity
to continue the turn. At ∼700 ms, the average other-initiation
of repair occurs after the absence of a continuation by the current speaker would be recognizable. Indeed, there is evidence

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing of other-initiations of repair

that 700 ms may in fact be a generic threshold in conversation
(Kendrick and Torreira, 2012, 2014; Roberts and Francis, 2013),
perhaps for this very reason.
A third constraint at the final boundary of the transition
space is grounded not in the rules for turn allocation but in
the potential for silences in conversation to become meaningful, as signals of interactional trouble (Jefferson, 1986, 1983a;
Pomerantz, 1984; Schegloff, 1988; inter alia). In an adjacency-pair
sequence, to cite but one context, even a slight delay beyond a
normal transition increases the likelihood that the second pair
part will have a dispreferred turn format, and a long delay, on
the order of 700–800 ms, is a reliable signal that a dispreferred
response is imminent (Kendrick and Torreira, 2014). The semiotics of silence is therefore an additional basis for a constraint
on the timing of next turns, one that, like the rules for turn allocation, creates a bias toward fast transitions and the attendant
minimization of gaps.
Given the existence of systemic constrains on the timing of
next turns and the observation that OIR occur after significantly
longer gaps than other turns, one solution to this apparent puzzle
naturally presents itself: OIRs may trump the rules of the turntaking system. Indeed, this appears to be the tack taken, though
only partially articulated, by Sacks et al. (1974) and Schegloff et al.
(1977). The timing of OIR, they argued, reveals “the independent
status of the repair organization, whose operation may supersede otherwise operative aspects of the turn-taking organization”
(Schegloff et al., 1977, p. 374). Although they do not elaborate
this point, they do provide one additional example. In a discussion of second-starter supersession (i.e., methods whereby
a second speaker to self-select may win the turn), Sacks et al.
(1974, p. 720) observe that “when a self-selector’s turn-beginning
reveals his turn’s talk to be prospectively addressed to a problem of understanding [a] prior utterance, he may by virtue
of that get the turn, even though at the turn-transfer another
started before him.” In other words, a second speaker to selfselect takes priority if he or she produces an other-initiation of
repair. This, then, is evidence that participants in conversation
orient to resolving troubles of hearing and understanding as a
“priority activity” (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 720), one which takes
precedence over rules of the turn-taking system that motivate fast
turn transitions.
A consequence of the priority of OIR, one which to my knowledge has not previously been registered, is that OIRs may freely
start up in overlap with a post-trouble-source turn or TCU, and
need not employ the practices for overlap competition described
by Schegloff (2000), such as increases in volume, speech rate, or
pitch. In each of the cases below, an OIR starts up in overlap with
a turn or TCU that intervenes between it and the trouble-source
TCU. Although the OIR is not designed as competitive, in each
case the speaker of the prior turn or TCU drops out, ceding the
turn to the speaker of the OIR.
(13) KC-4:2 (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 720)
1 R:
Hey::, the place looks different.
2 F:
Yea::hh.
3 K: ->
Ya have to see ou[r new4 D: ->
[It does?
5 R:
Oh yeah

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 158

Kendrick

(14) WG 4-13-nh (Benjamin, 2013, p. 188)
1 Hal:
he may be victimized on it
2
(0.6)
3 Hal: -> I’m not sure he’s ma[king]
4 Nix: ->
[you ] mean by his lawyer
5 Nix:
[hhhhhhhhh]
6 Hal:
[yeah or] (.) somebody else

(15) CallHome 6079 (Benjamin, 2013, p. 119)
1 A:
it was [so: nice] it was so nice =
2 B:
[hhhhh @ ]
3 A:
= that they came I can’t even tell you
4
like.hhhh like (0.6) just seeing them
5
like I was performing to them
6
(.)
7
->
like I was sm[iling at th]em like
8 B: ->
[to who. ]
9 A:
.hhhh Juliette, Sam: and (.) and Tara

The fact that OIRs win the turn without the need for competition and, moreover, that trouble-source speakers respond to OIRs
with no delay is further evidence that repair is a priority activity
in conversation (see also Extract 4).
The data above also illustrate yet another intersection between
turn-taking and repair. As noted previously, the imminent possibility that a current speaker may continue his or her turn if
no one self-selects builds a motivation for fast transitions into
the turn-taking system. Note, however, that the OIRs in Extracts
(14) and (15) occur in overlap with a continuation by the current
speaker (at the first arrowed lines). This demonstrates that OIRs
supersede not only first-starters in self-selection, but also continuations by current speakers. The window of opportunity for OIRs
is thus larger than for other next turns, which are subject to constraints on turn allocation and overlap that OIRs appear to out
rank.
This is not to say that the timing of OIR is without constraint. The organization of repair imposes certain constraints
on the timing of OIRs vis-à-vis the selection of OIR practices
(see Robinson, 2014). An open OIR locates a trouble-source TCU
exclusively via adjacency and is therefore positionally restricted.
If a next speaker fails to hear or understand a TCU well enough to
employ a specific OIR practice, then the window of opportunity
to use an open OIR has an outer bound: the possible completion
of a subsequent TCU that intervenes between the trouble-source
TCU and the open OIR. In other words, the opportunity space for

References
Benjamin, T. (2012). When problems pass us by: using ‘You Mean’ to help
locate the source of trouble. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 45, 82–109. doi:
10.1080/08351813.2012.646742
Benjamin, T. (2013). Signaling Trouble: On the Linguistic Design of Other-Initiation
of Repair in English Conversation. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Groningen,
The Netherlands.
Benjamin, T., and Walker, T. (2013). Managing problems of acceptability through high rise-fall repetitions. Discourse Process. 50, 107–138. doi:
10.1080/0163853X.2012.739143
Bolden, G. B. (2009). “Implementing delayed actions,” in Conversation Analysis:
Comparative Perspectives, ed. J. Sidnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), 326–353. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511635670.012

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing of other-initiations of repair

open OIR is a one-TCU interval (Robinson, 2014). But does this
constraint, which operates for open OIRs, establish a motivation
for fast turn transitions? It provides an outer bound for the timing
of open OIRs, but given that an open OIR can in principle occur
in overlap with a subsequent TCU (before its possible completion) and take priority, it would not systematically motivate a fast
transition on the order of 100–300 ms between the trouble-source
TCU and the OIR.
What, then, of the potential for silences to be meaningful,
as signals of interactional trouble? Might this provide a motivation for fast transitions? The answer becomes clear once one
registers that OIRs are themselves signals of interactional trouble. Although a covert signal of trouble like silence will be at
cross-purposes with some incipient actions (e.g., agreement), it
can also point in the same direction as an incipient action (e.g.,
rejection), in which case it is interactionally advantageous. An
expanded transition space can indicate that a next speaker has
encountered trouble, but it also provides an opportunity for the
resolution of the trouble. There is reason to believe that speakers
do not avoid this covert signal (e.g., by initiating repair quickly),
but rather exploit it. As a motivation for fast turn transfers, the
potential for silences in conversation to be meaningful signals of
interactional trouble is thus context-sensitive, operating only for
next turns not themselves designed as signals of trouble.
In sum, the rules and constraints of the turn-taking system
that motivate fast transitions – concerning overlap management,
turn allocation, and the semiotics of silence – neither rule nor
constrain the timing of OIRs. The priority given, at the intersection of turn-taking and repair, to the resolution of troubles in
hearing and understanding provides a systemic explanation for
the observation that transitions before OIRs tend to be longer
than those before other next turns, for which the rules and
constraints of the turn-taking system remain operative.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jeff Robinson, Trevor Benjamin, and Steve
Levinson for useful comments on earlier versions of this article,
as well as Francisco Torreira, from whom I have learned a great
deal. This research was made possible by the financial support
of the Language and Cognition Department at the Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Bolden, G. B., Mandelbaum, J., and Wilkinson, S. (2012). Pursuing a response
by repairing an indexical reference. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 45, 137–155. doi:
10.1080/08351813.2012.673380
Bosch, L.-T., Oostdijk, N., and Boves, L. (2005). On temporal aspects of
turn taking in conversational dialogues. Speech Commun. 47, 80–86. doi:
10.1016/j.specom.2005.05.009
Clark, H. H., and Schaefer, E. F. (1987). Collaborating on contributions to conversations. Lang. Cogn. Process. 2, 19–41. doi: 10.1080/01690968708406350
Doherty-Sneddon, G., and Phelps, F. G. (2005). Gaze aversion: a response to
cognitive or social difficulty? Mem. Cogn. 33, 727–733. doi: 10.3758/BF031
95338
Drew, P. (1997). ‘Open’ class repair initiators in response to sequential sources
of troubles in conversation. J. Pragmat. 28, 69–101. doi: 10.1016/S03782166(97)89759-7

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 159

Kendrick

Egbert, M., Golato, A., and Robinson, J. D. (2009). “Repairing reference,” in
Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives, ed. J. Sidnell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 104–132. doi: 10.1017/CBO97805116356
70.005
Floyd, S., Manrique, E., Rossi, G., and Torreira, F. (in press). The timing of visual
bodily behavior in repair sequences: evidence from three languages. Discourse
Process. doi: 10.1080/0163853X.2014.992680
Ford, C. E., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). “Interactional units in conversation: syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns,” in
Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S. A. Thompson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 134–184.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall.
Glenberg, A. M., Schroeder, J. L., and Robertson, D. A. (1998). Averting the
gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering. Mem. Cogn. 26,
651–658. doi: 10.3758/BF03211385
Goodwin, C. (1980). Restarts, pauses, and the achievement of a state of
mutual gaze at turn-beginning. Sociol. Inq. 50, 272–302. doi: 10.1111/j.1475682X.1980.tb00023.x
Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers
and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.
Goodwin, M. H., and Goodwin, C. (1986). Gesture and coparticipation in the
activity of searching for a word. Semiotica 62, 51–76.
Haakana, M., and Kurhila, S. (2009). “Other-correction in everyday interaction:
some comparative aspects,” in Talk in interaction: Comparative Dimensions, eds
M. Haakana, M. Laakso, and J. Lindström (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society),
152–179.
Heath, C. (1984). “Talk and recipiency: sequential organization in speech and body
movement,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis,
eds J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
247–265.
Heldner, M., and Edlund, J. (2010). Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations. J.
Phon. 38, 555–568. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2010.08.002
Hepburn, A., and Bolden, G. B. (2013). “The conversation analytic approach to
transcription,” in The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, eds J. Sidnell and T.
Stivers (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd).
Heritage, J. (1984). “A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, eds J. M.
Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 299–345.
Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in action: action formation and territories of
knowledge. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 45, 1–29. doi: 10.1080/08351813.2012.
646684
Himmelmann, N. P. (1996). “Demonstratives in narrative discourse: a taxonomy
of universal uses,” in Studies in Anaphora, ed. B. A. Fox (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company), 205–254.
Holler, J., and Kendrick, K. H. (2015). Unaddressed participants’ gaze in
multi-person interaction: optimizing recipiency. Front. Lang. Sci. 6:98. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00098
Hothorn, T., Hornik, K., van de Wiel, M. A., and Zeileis, A. (2006).
A Lego system for conditional inference. Am. Stat. 60, 257–263. doi:
10.1198/000313006X118430
Indefrey, P. (2011). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production
components: a critical update. Front. Psychol. 2:255. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.
00255
Indefrey, P., and Levelt, W. J. M. (2004). The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components. Cognition 92, 101–144. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2002.06.001
Jefferson, G. (1973). A case of precision timing in ordinary conversation: overlapped tag-positioned address terms in closing sequences. Semiotica 9, 47–96.
doi: 10.1515/semi.1973.9.1.47
Jefferson, G. (1983a). Notes on a possible metric which provides for a ‘Standard
Maximum’ silence of approximately one second in conversation. Tilburg Papers
Lang. Lit. 42, 1–83.
Jefferson, G. (1983b). On a failed hypothesis: ‘Conjunctionals’ as overlapvulnerable. Tilburg Papers Lang. Lit. 28, 1–33.
Jefferson, G. (1984). “Notes on some orderlinesses of overlap onset,” in Discourse
Analysis and Natural Rhetoric, eds V. D’Urso and P. Leonardi (Padua: Cleup
Editore), 11–38.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing of other-initiations of repair

Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on ‘Latency’ in overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.
doi: 10.1007/BF00148125
Jefferson, G. (1987). “On exposed and embedded correction in conversation,”
in Talk and Social Organization, eds G. Button and J. R. E. Lee (Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters), 86–100.
Kendrick, K. H. (in press). Other-initiated repair in English. Open Linguist. 1,
164–190. doi: 10.2478/opli-2014-0009
Kendrick, K. H., and Torreira, F. (2012). The timing and construction of preference: a quantitative study. Paper presented at the Discourse, Communication,
and Conversation Conference, Loughborough University, Loughborough.
Kendrick, K. H., and Torreira, F. (2014). The timing and construction of preference: a quantitative study. Discourse Process. doi:
10.1080/0163853X.2014.955997
Kitzinger, C. (2013). “Repair,” in The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, eds
J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd), 229–256. doi:
10.1080/0163853X.2014.955997
Labov, W., and Fanshel, D. (1977). Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as
Conversation. New York: Academic Press.
Lerner, G. H. (2003). Selecting next speaker: the context-sensitive operation of a context-free organization. Lang. Soc. 32, 177–201. doi:
10.1017/S004740450332202X
Levinson, S. C. (2013). “Action formation and ascription,” in The Handbook of
Conversation Analysis, eds J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Malden, MA: Wiley–
Blackwell Publishing Ltd), 101–130.
Li, X. (2014). Leaning and recipient intervening questions in Mandarin conversation. J. Pragmat. 67, 34–60. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2014.03.011
Local, J., and Walker, G. (2004). Abrupt-joins as a resource for the production of multi-unit, multi-action turns. J. Pragmat. 36, 1375–1403. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2004.04.006
Magyari, L., Bastiaansen, M. C. M., de Ruiter, J. P., and Levinson, S. C. (2014). Early
anticipation lies behind the speed of response in conversation. J. Cogn. Neurosci.
26, 2530–2539. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00673
Magyari, L., and de Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on
anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.
00376
Markson, L., and Paterson, K. B. (2009). Effects of Gaze-aversion on visual-spatial
imagination. Br. J. Psychol. 100, 553–563. doi: 10.1348/000712608X371762
Mondada, L. (2006). Participants’ online analysis and multimodal practices: projecting the end of the turn and the closing of the sequence. Discourse Stud. 8,
117–129. doi: 10.1177/1461445606059561
Mondada, L. (2007). Multimodal resources for turn-taking pointing and the
emergence of possible next speakers. Discourse Stud. 9, 194–225. doi:
10.1177/1461445607075346
Pomerantz, A. (1984). “Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features
of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies
in Conversation Analysis, eds J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 57–101.
R Development Core Team. (2013). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical
Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at:
http://www.r-project.org/
Rasmussen, G. (2013). Inclined to better understanding—the coordination of
talk and ‘leaning forward’ in doing repair. J. Pragmat. 65, 30–45. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2013.10.001
Roberts, F., and Francis, A. L. (2013). Identifying a temporal threshold of tolerance for silent gaps after requests. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 133, EL471–EL477. doi:
10.1121/1.4802900
Roberts, F., and Robinson, J. D. (2004). Interobserver agreement on first-stage
conversation analytic transcription. Hum. Commun. Res. 30, 376–410. doi:
10.1111/j.1468-2958.2004.tb00737.x
Robinson, J. D. (2006). Managing trouble responsibility and relationships during conversational repair. Commun. Monogr. 73, 137–161. doi:
10.1080/03637750600581206
Robinson, J. D. (2014). What ‘What?’ tells us about how conversationalists manage intersubjectivity. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 47, 109–129. doi:
10.1080/08351813.2014.900214
Robinson, J., and Kevoe-Feldman, K. (2010). Using full repeats to initiate
repair on others’ questions. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 43, 232–259. doi:
10.1080/08351813.2010.497990

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 160

Kendrick

Rossano, F. (2006). When the eyes meet: using gaze to mobilize response. Paper
Presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, Helsinki.
Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze Behavior in Face-to-Face Interaction. Ph.D. thesis,
Radboud University, Nijmegen.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language (Baltim) 50, 696–735.
Schegloff, E. A. (1987). “Recycled turn beginnings: a precise repair mechanism in
conversation’s turn-taking oragnisation,” in Talk and Social Organisation, eds
G. Button and J. R. E. Lee (Phiadelphia: Multilingual Matters), 70–93.
Schegloff, E. A. (1988). On an actual virtual servo-mechanism for guessing
bad news: a single case conjecture. Soc. Probl. 35, 442–457. doi: 10.2307/
800596
Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Repair after next turn: the last structurally provided
defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. Am. J. Soc. 97, 1295–1345. doi:
10.1086/229903
Schegloff, E. A. (1997). Practices and actions: boundary cases of other-initiated
repair. Discourse Process. 23, 499–545. doi: 10.1080/01638539709545001
Schegloff, E. A. (1998). Body torque. Soc. Res. (N. Y.) 65, 535–596.
Schegloff, E. A. (2000). When ‘Others’ initiate repair. Appl. Linguist. 21, 205–243.
doi: 10.1093/applin/21.2.205
Schegloff, E. A. (2006). “Interaction: the infrastructure for social institutions, the
natural ecological niche for language, and the arena in which culture is situated,” in Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds N. J.
Enfield and S. C. Levinson (Oxford: Berg Publishers), 70–96.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer
in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:
10.1017/CBO9780511791208
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., and Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for selfcorrection in the organization of repair in conversation. Language (Baltim) 53,
361–382.
Selting, M. (1988). The role of intonation in the organization of repair and
problem handling sequences in conversation. J. Pragmat. 12, 293–322. doi:
10.1016/0378-2166(88)90035-5
Seo, M.-S., and Koshik, I. (2010). A conversation analytic study of gestures that
engender repair in ESL conversational tutoring. J. Pragmat. 42, 2219–2239. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2010.01.021

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Timing of other-initiations of repair

Sjerps, M. J., and Meyer, A. S. (2015). Variation in dual-task performance reveals
late initiation of speech planning in turn-taking. Cognition 136, 304–324. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2014.10.008
Stivers, T., Enfielda, N. J., Browna, P., Englertb, C., Hayashic, M., Heinemann,
T., et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.09036
16106
Stivers, T., and Rossano, F. (2010). Mobilizing response. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact.
43, 3–31. doi: 10.1080/08351810903471258
Strömbergsson, S., Hjalmarsson, A., Edlund, J., and House, D. (2013). “Timing
responses to question S in dialogue,” in Proceedings of Interspeech 2013, (Lyon:
International Speech Communication Association), 2584–2588.
Svennevig, J. (2008). Trying the easiest solution first in other-initiation of repair. J.
Pragmat. 40, 333–348. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2007.11.007
Wilkinson, S., and Kitzinger, C. (2006). Surprise as an interactional achievement: reaction tokens in conversation. Soc. Psychol. Q. 69, 150–182. doi:
10.1177/019027250606900203
Wilson, T., and Zimmerman, D. (1986). The structure of silence between
turns in two-party conversation. Discourse Process. 9, 375–390. doi:
10.1080/01638538609544649
Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., and Sloetjes, H. (2006).
ELAN: A Professional Framework for Multimodality Research (2006). Available
at: http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/
Wong, J. (2000). Delayed next turn repair initiation in native/non-native speaker
English conversation. Appl. Linguist. 21, 244–267. doi: 10.1093/applin/21.2.244
Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
c 2015 Kendrick. This is an open-access article distributed under the
Copyright 
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or
reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor
are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance
with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted
which does not comply with these terms.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 250 | 161

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 10 March 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00251

Expanded transition spaces: the case
of Garrwa
Rod Gardner 1* and Ilana Mushin 2
1

School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Mount Gravatt,
QLD, Australia, 2 School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland, QLD, Australia

Edited by:
Judith Holler,
Max Planck Institute Psycholinguistics,
Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Kobin H. Kendrick,
Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Netherlands
Jack Sidnell,
University of Toronto, Canada
*Correspondence:
Rod Gardner,
School of Education
and Professional Studies,
Griffith University,
Mount Gravatt Campus,
176 Messines Ridge Road,
Mount Gravatt, QLD 4122, Australia
r.gardner@griffith.edu.au
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences, a section of the
journal Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 30 October 2014
Accepted: 19 February 2015
Published: 10 March 2015
Citation:
Gardner R and Mushin I (2015)
Expanded transition spaces: the case
of Garrwa. Front. Psychol. 6:251.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00251

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Accounts of turn-taking in much of the CA literature have largely focused on talk which
progresses with minimal gaps between turns at talk, longer gaps being found to be
symptomatic of, for example, engagement in non-talk activities, or as indicators of some
kind of trouble in the interaction. In this paper we present an account of turn-taking
in conversations between Indigenous Australians where longer gaps are frequent and
regular. We show that in sequences of such slow-paced conversation, gaps are not
always treated as problematic, nor are they associated with non-talk activities that might
inhibit talk. In such contexts we argue that there is less orientation to gap minimization,
reflecting a lack of pressure for continuous talk. We also discuss qualitative differences
in the nature of the gaps between turns in which there is a selection of next speaker, and
those where no next speaker has been selected. Finally we consider whether such talk
is a feature of Indigenous Australian conversation, or a more widespread practice.
Keywords: conversation analysis, transition spaces, turn-taking, Aboriginal conversation, conversation and
culture

Introduction
This report had its genesis in a project investigating Aboriginal Australian conversation in the
Garrwa language, with a focus on turn-taking practices (Gardner and Mushin, 2007; Mushin
and Gardner, 2009, 2011; Gardner, 2010). One observation that emerged from this study was
that the pace of these conversations appeared overall to be slower than has been reported
for conversation in most of the literature on turn-taking. A specific feature of this slowness
was seen in the distribution of inter-turn gaps of silence—the time it took for a next speaker
to begin talking when the conversational floor was free. Ethnographic reports of Australian
Aboriginal conversation have suggested a tolerance for greater gaps between turns than for
Anglo Australian conversation (Walsh, 1991; Eades, 2000, 2007). This prompted the question
whether this perceived slower pace indicated something about the fundamental ways in which
Aboriginal Australians conduct their conversations, particularly in the overall pace of the talk
and timing of speaker change. One hypothesis for these extended gaps between turns is, as
Walsh (1991) implied, that Aboriginal Australians are orienting to a different set of rules for
conversational turn-taking than are found in those societies that have been the basis of most
Abbreviations: ABL, ablative; ACC, accusative; ALL, allative; BARRI, a discourse particle; CONJ, conjunction; DAT, dative;
DEM, demonstrative; DS, different subject (switch reference marker); ERG, ergative; FUT, future; HAB, habitual; IMP, imperative; INTENS, intensifier; KANYI, verbal morpheme (yet to be labeled); LOC, locative; NA, a discourse particle; NEG, negative
particle; PA, past tense; PURP, purposive; WA, grammatical morpheme (yet to be labeled); 1sg, first person singular; 2sg, second person singular; 1duIncl, first person dual inclusive (you and me); 3du, third person dual; 1plncl, first person plural
inclusive; 1plExcl, first person plural exclusive; 3pl, third person plural.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 162

Gardner and Mushin

investigations of turn-taking phenomena, starting with Sacks
et al.’s (1974) seminal paper on the systematics of turn-taking
using English language data. Walsh suggested that Aboriginal talk
is “broadcast” to all present rather than to specific recipients, and
further, that in a “non-dyadic” mode of speaking. He also claimed
that Aboriginal speakers have a much greater tolerance for silence
in conversation.
An alternative hypothesis is based on what Schegloff (2007)
has posited as possible departures from interactional formats
familiar to Western industrialized nations (which) involve what
might be called “differences in the value of variables.” Under this
hypothesis, the basic rules for turn-taking are the same, but the
lengths of time that count as silence may be calibrated differently across cultures. This suggestion has received support from
a study by Stivers et al. (2009), which examined the delays (or
“response offsets”) in responding to polar questions across 10
languages from five continents that were different in terms of
language family and culture. They established that longer delays
in response were associated with four parameters: if a question
was not answered rather than answered; if a question was disconfirmed rather than confirmed; if a response was verbal rather
than visible (such as a head nod); and if the speaker had no gaze
contact with the recipient rather than gaze contact. They found
a mean response time of just over 0.2 s, but variation across languages, with Japanese the shortest at less than 0.1 s, and Danish
the longest at a little under 0.5 s. The overall mode was 0 s (supporting the Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson claim reported below
that turn transitions with no gap and no overlap are common),
with a mode variation between 0.0 and 0.2 s across the 10 languages. They found that in all languages the response time was
between zero and half a second, which they argue suggests a universal across all languages for gap minimization. They found no
correlations of length of delays between closely related languages
nor between similar cultures. The variations that they found in
response offset times arose from what they termed “a different
cultural “calibration” of delay” (p. 10590), which, they claim, has
to do with the general pace of conversations and the general
tempo of life in the communities in which these languages are
spoken.
What we report in this paper is that that these Garrwa speakers have tolerance for silences between turns that appears to
be greater than it is for English conversation, including AngloAustralian conversation, and indeed there is some evidence (cf.
Gardner, 2010) that this appears to be stronger than for any of
the 10 languages reported in Stivers et al. (2009). However, we
provide evidence that in some Anglo-Australian conversations,
under certain situational conditions, there also appears to be a
greater tolerance for lengthy interturn silences. In these conversations, couples were at home alone in the evening, engaging in
“non-focused” talk (cf. Couper-Kuhlen, 2010). This leads us to
the hypothesis that what we are finding is not any difference in
the ways in which speakers allocate turns of talk, but rather that
the circumstances in which the talk is occurring may be what is
leading to “differences in the values of variables,” in this case the
length of interturn silences. We also find strong evidence that
Aboriginal speakers of Garrwa generally adhere to the rules of
turn-taking as proposed by Sacks et al. (1974).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Expanded transition spaces

Based on these observations, the questions we address in this
paper are whether delayed onset of talk by a next speaker:
• constitutes a different system of turn-taking among Garrwa
from that outlined in Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson;
• can be accounted for within the existing parameters for turntaking without resorting to cross-cultural explanations.
Sacks et al. (1974) proposed a set of rules that derive from two
proposals: first, that a turn at talk is made up of a word, phrase
or sentence that can stand alone and make full sense in the context of the conversation (a “turn constructional unit” or TCU)1 ,
and second, that there is a short period of time at the end of a
TCU within which change of speaker is warranted by the rules
(the “transition relevance place” or TRP). Where a “normal”
transition-relevance place begins and ends is not often discussed
explicitly in the literature, but the normal, or default space has
been declared to be one “beat of silence,” i.e., the time it takes
to say a single syllable at normal rate (Jefferson, 1984; Schegloff,
2000). Wells and Macfarlane (1998) suggest that it extends from
a final, turn-ending projecting accent in a TCU to the onset of
a next speaker’s talk, which may typically be about two beats, or
0.2 s2 . If someone starts speaking outside the TRP, this can be
treated by participants as problematic.
There are two rules, which specify how change of speaker
occurs. The first of these is divided into three parts. The first of
these, rule 1a, states that if in the course of a turn the speaker
of that turn selects someone to speak next, for example by naming them, by gaze, by touch or by asking a question that only
one other participant has the knowledge to answer. Under such
circumstances, the speaker who has been selected is obliged to
begin speaking at the TRP that occurs at the end of the TCU
that is in progress. The second part, rule 1b, comes into play
if the current speaker does not select a next speaker, and states
that at the next TRP, any speaker other than the current speaker
may start speaking (or may “self-select,”) and if there is more
than one other participant, the first to start has rights to the
floor. The third part, rule 1c, states that if no other speaker selfselects under rule 1b, then the current speaker may (but need
not) continue speaking, thereby producing a second TCU in their
turn. A second rule is necessary because under rule 1c, there
has been no change of speaker, so in order to state how such
change occurs, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson made explicit that
if current speaker does continue under rule 1c, then the three
parts of the first rule are recycled until change of speaker does
occur.
This simple set of rules has a power that may not be immediately obvious, namely that, first, the system is built to ensure
that speaker change occurs frequently, but also, second, bids
for speakership need to be made with precision timing that
1 Since

1974, the notion of what constitutes a turn-constructional unit has developed further, see for example Schegloff (1996) and Ford and Thompson (1996).
2 Where a “normal” transition-relevance place begins and ends is not often discussed explicitly in the literature, but the normal, or default space has been declared
to be one “beat of silence,” i.e., the time it takes to say a single syllable at normal
rate (Jefferson, 1984; Schegloff, 2000). Wells and Macfarlane (1998) suggest that it
extends from a final, turn-ending projecting accent in a TCU to the onset of a next
speaker’s talk, which may typically be about two beats, or 0.2 s.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 163

Gardner and Mushin

requires preparation for the bid while the current TCU is still
underway.
First we demonstrate that the participants in these Garrwa
conversations on many occasions allocate turns very much in
the way predicted by Sacks et al. (1974). Then we examine some
examples of talk with expanded transition spaces, in which gaps
between turns appear to be longer that Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson talk of as a normal TRP. They claim as one of their “gross
observations” that speaker transitions with no gap or overlap are
common, and together with transitions with slight gaps or overlaps, they make up the “vast majority of transitions” (p. 701).
In the Garrwa conversations, we commonly find a tolerance for
silence between turns of up to several seconds. Sometimes these
silences can be accounted for by non-talk activities, such as drinking or grooming that may be distracting the speaker from the
ongoing talk, but some activities, such as grooming, do not in
and of themselves disable the ability to talk. We then examine
whether there are differences in the length of long silences following current speaker selection of the next speaker (rule 1a)
or following self-selection of next speaker (rule 1b), and we
report that we do find regular differences in the length of the
long silences after application of rule 1a, compared with turns
after application of rule 1b. Finally, we pose the question of the
degree to which these unusually long silences are a phenomenon
of Aboriginal Australian interactions—and perhaps the interactions of some other indigenous peoples (cf. Scollon and Scollon,
1981; Hoymann, 2010)—or a more general practice of talk-ininteraction that derives from a lack of pressure for continuous
talk, associated with situational factors such as intimates just
“hanging out” with nothing particular to talk about, in familiar
surroundings with no pressure to “get things done.” We then
begin to examine the extent to which long gaps between turns
are a cultural phenomenon by examining some examples of long
gaps between turns in two Anglo-Australian English language
conversations.
A number of Conversation Analysts have suggested that
delayed responses are regularly associated with problems in the
talk. There may be talk-internal reasons for the silences, such
as word searches (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987; Hayashi, 2003),
attempting to gain the attention of another speaker (Goodwin,
1981), speech impairment of one or more of the participants
(Goodwin, 1995b). Other delays may occur prior to dispreferred, or non-agreeing responses (Pomerantz, 1984a), or during resistance to requests (Davidson, 1984)3 . Pomerantz (1984b)
points to recipient problems due to unclear references in the
prior speaker’s turn, a lack of recipient knowledge that the prior
speaker had assumed, and recipient disagreement to account for
silences of up to about a second between a first pair part (such as
a question) and a second pair part (such as an answer). Davidson
(1984) notes that silence after a first pair part can be a result of
“puzzlement, or lack of clarity about exactly what’s being offered”
(p. 127), as well as difficulty in hearing and doubt about the
3 While Kendrick and Torreira (2014) reported that dispreferred responses occur
more commonly than preferred responses after a longer gap of silence, they also
found that the most frequently occurring dispreferred and preferred responses
occur after gaps of a similar length.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Expanded transition spaces

acceptability of the proposal (p. 103). In some forms of institutional talk, long silences may be tolerated, for example in language (and perhaps other) classrooms where a teacher may wait
a long time for a student answer to her question (Gardner, 2007).
Silences after first pair parts can be precursors to a “potential
rejection” (p. 103). As Jefferson (1986) puts it, ‘for the vast majority of cases “utterance + pause” does not capture the routine ways
that recipients monitor talk in progress. What it does recurrently
catch is a particular sort of problem posed for speakers’ (p. 179).
When these problematic silences occur, she also notes that they
tend not to exceed about 1 s in length (Jefferson, 1989). Longer
silences are avoided: “Whatever one might mean by “waiting long
enough,” waiting beyond 1 s is waiting too long” (Jefferson, 1986,
p. 179).
There was, however, no indication that most of the silences
in the Garrwa conversations were “problematic for the participants” (Jefferson, 1989, p. 170), which is in contrast to most
of the longer silences reported in Jefferson’s “standard maximum silence” paper. There was little evidence that these kinds
of silences were particularly “meaningful.” They appeared to be
indicators of normal conversation.
Thus, in order to determine whether the talk is truly slowpaced, and unusually long gaps are regularly occurring, possibilities such as problems of various kinds, or orientation to another
activity, need to be ruled out. In fact, some of the silences in
the conversations studied for this project could be explained by
interactional features of these kinds. Many others, however, could
not. In the sequences of slow-paced talk we are describing, gaps
are the norm, and there is little evidence of anything problematic or unusual in the talk. In fact, even where the slow-paced
talk occurs around “problematic” activities, the talk is conducted
even more lethargically than similar situations reported in the literature, with regular gaps far exceeding Jefferson’s “one second”
metric.

Rules, Gaps, and Lapses
The focal point for this paper is the nature of gaps of silence
between turns, and the interesting case is what happens if current speaker does not continue, as this is the point at which gaps
between turns emerge (cf. Wilson and Zimmerman, 1986). As
Sacks et al. (1974) state, these turn-taking rules have a number of
consequences for the conduct of ordinary conversation, including an orientation to the minimization of gaps between turns
at talk. For example, if self-selection is used, then the incoming speaker is constrained by the possibility of current speaker
continuing under 1c, as well as possible competition from other
self-selectors, so an early start—as early as possible in the TRP—
is necessary to assure speakership. As Moerman (1988) puts it,
‘there is some pressure upon a person who wants to speak next to
come in a little before . . . a possible end. Moreover, if he doesn’t
come in now, he may not get to come in next (and) an aspiring
speaker who doesn’t get to have his say next, might never get to
have it’ (p. 20). In a similar vein, Fox (2007) notes that ‘speakers
and recipients in real-time conversation have immense time pressures on them . . . recipients must be ready to start up a turn which
is in some way responsive to the current turn, without delay, as

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 164

Gardner and Mushin

soon as the speaker has come to possible completion of current
turn’ (p. 314).
As Sacks et al. (1974) say, ‘The components and the rule
set, in organizing transfer exclusively around transition-relevance
places, provide for the possibility of transitions with no gap and
no overlap’ (p. 708). Notwithstanding this provision, and Moerman’s and Fox’s observations above, silences can occur, and it is
the very optionality of rules 1b and 1c—no speaker is obliged to
self-select, nor is a current speaker obliged to continue if no other
self-selects—that allows for the possibility of silences that can
grow into extended gaps, and ultimately into lapses in the conversation, which is when participants disengage from each other.
As Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson put it, ‘discontinuities occur
when, at some transition-relevance place, a current speaker has
stopped, no speaker starts (or continues), and the ensuing space
of non-talk constitutes itself as more than a gap—not a gap, but
a lapse’ (p. 714). Note also that lapses can only occur after a current speaker has chosen not to continue when no other speaker
has self-selected. No lapse can properly occur under the “current
speaker selects next” provision4 . As the authors point out, in such
an event, ‘a silence after a turn in which a next has been selected
will be heard not as a lapse’s possible beginning, nor as a gap,
but as a pause before the selected next speaker’s turn-beginning’
(p. 715). In contrast, if no next speaker is selected, and no other
speaker self-selects, and further, current speaker elects not to continue under 1c, then “a series of rounds of possible self-selection
by others and self-selection by current to continue—rules 1b and
1c—may develop, in none of which are options to talk exercised, with the thereby constituted development of a lapse in
the conversation” (p. 715)5 . The implication of this is that in
turn-by-turn talk participants are under considerable pressure to
produce their turns early, within the transition space, but there
are also provisions in the rules for turns to be delayed, which
ultimately can account for lapses in a conversation.
4 Whilst lapses do not occur after “current speaker selects next” has been applied,
it can be the case that gaps open up, and in these gaps it may be that, in
the absence of a response by the selected speaker beyond the “normal” transition space (cf. Stivers and Rossano, 2010), another speaker may respond (Stivers
and Robinson, 2006). In the cases these authors present, the gaps are mostly
less than a second before a non-selected speaker responds. In some other cases,
the selected speaker may be engaged in some other activity, contributing to the
non-response. A central point the authors make is that there are two competing preferences at work when “current speaker selects next” is applied: one for
the speaker so selected to speak, and a second for the action implemented by
the current speaker’s turn, e.g., a question, to be responded to, e.g., with an
answer (if necessary by another speaker if the selected speaker cannot or does
not answer). They say in relation to these two competing preferences that “the
rule (i.e., 1a) is incrementally relaxed, suggesting an additional order of organization exists past the TRP which is laminated on top of the existing rule”
(p. 391).
5 We are not sure how one can determine that “rounds” of possible self-selection
may develop (cf. Wilson and Zimmerman, 1986). An alternative possibility is that
once the transition place has passed, and no next speaker has been selected under
rule 1a, any speaker can self-select. This is, of course, a matter for empirical investigation, and is beyond the scope of this paper. However, cases such as the following
(taken from the first author’s data) raise interesting questions.
1
Liz:
=Oh;= that’s good.
2
(6.5)
◦◦ (whoohh hehh)◦◦
3
Mel:
4
(8.6)

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Expanded transition spaces

Data and Methods
Our corpus consists of five conversations recorded in two remote
Aboriginal communities in Australia’s Northern Territory, near
the Gulf of Carpentaria. Four conversations were recorded in
the small town of Borroloola, which has a population of about
1000, the vast majority of whom are Indigenous Australians
belonging to four different language groups. These conversations were audio recorded only6 . The fifth conversation was
recorded at Robinson River, a Garrwa (Aboriginal) community
with a population of about 250 about 2 h drive south of Borroloola. There were five principal participants in these conversations: two elderly Garrwa women in Borroloola (Tina and
Ellen7 ), and three elderly Garrwa women in Robinson River
(Daphne, Hilda, and Katelin). The Borroloola data were mostly
recorded on the veranda of a cabin, the second author and
occasional passers-by entered the conversations on a few occasions. The Robinson River data features three elderly Garrwa
women who were sitting on the ground on the front porch of
the house of one of the women. We call this the “Porch” data.
The recording, which lasts for over 2 h in total, was initially
set up by the second author to record interactions between fluent Garrwa speakers and children who are not fluent in Garrwa. After about 20 min, the children leave (or are told to leave)
by the elderly women, leaving the three of them alone on the
porch. It is at this point that the task of recording Garrwa language ceases to be the focus of the talk and the topics turn to
matters such as planning future hunting expeditions, complaining, reminiscing, and interacting with other residents as they
pass by.
5
6
7

Mel:
Liz:
Liz:

->
->

[Tom-] (.) [Tommy-]
[D’ju] [D’ju wa-]
Sorry-. Mel d’yu wan’ that o nion.=
bicoz8
(0.7) ◦ I- (.) > don’ thing I’ll< (.) >be
9
able ta< digest it.
Liz and Mel are at the dinner table. After line 1, a silence ensues, grows, and
becomes a lapse, though there is a sigh after six-and-a-half seconds. After no
talk for about 16 s, both start to speak simultaneously. Both drop out after
one beat of talk, there’s a micro-pause, both begin to talk again with identical starts, this time they go on for two beats, and again both drop out. Liz
then gets the floor at the third attempt, starting with an apology. The question is what prompted such precision timing in their starts after such a long
silence. Preliminary findings by the first author suggest that some body coordination occurs before such post-lapse simultaneous starts. For the arguments
of direct relevance to the current paper, such instances would suggest that after
a certain length of silence, any speaker may start at any time. Whether that is
the case immediately after closure of the transition space, or after a second or
so (cf. Jefferson, 1989), or after some other metric remains to be determined.
If this turns out to be the case, it would mean that the priority given to selfselection (rule 1b) over current speaker continues (rule 1c) would at some point be
superseded.
6 We acknowledge the shortcomings of working solely with audio recorded
data. The Borroloola recordings were originally made for linguistic
analysis, and only later used for conversation analysis. For this reason, we use them only when there are no good illustrations of the
points we are making from the video data. Given the relative dearth
of Conversation Analytic studies on endangered, non-Western and nonindustrialized language groups, we feel justified in including some audio-only
data.
7 To preserve anonymity, names of participants have been changed.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 165

Gardner and Mushin

Expanded transition spaces

In all of the conversations much of the talk a mix of Garrwa, a local variety of Kriol (a local creole language) and Aboriginal English, reflecting normal patterns of community multilingualism. A total of about 35 min of the Borroloola conversation, and about 26 min of the Porch conversation have
been closely transcribed. In the collection of extracts from
these conversations we had over 400 speaker transitions, and
within this collection we analyzed more closely about 160
of the longer gaps. Four of the five women acted as informants and teachers of the language as part of the transcription
process.
Where we have video evidence, most (but not all) of the long
silences do not occur when participants are engaged in nontalk activities, such as those Jefferson (1989) points to explain
the extended silences in her data (including examining a train
timetable, scanning the surroundings in a neighborhood block
party, or writing down an address). On some occasions in our
data, something is going on in the environment that might hold
the participants’ attention, but on others the speakers are sitting
around doing nothing apart from talking.
We use Conversation Analysis to analyse the silences within
sequences of talk (Sidnell, 2011; Sidnell and Stivers, 2012). These
elderly women were among those who taught the second author
the grammar of Garrwa, and features of morphology are included
in the transcriptions to show turn construction features. The
women also provided us with some ethnographic and local contextual information where we needed it to understand what was
happening in the interactions, for example about the collection of
wild honey (“sugarbag”).
We measured the pauses by manually locating them through
the inspection of waveforms in Audacity (Audacity Team, 2013),
and these figures were then rounded up or down to the nearest
tenth of a second. The response offset is measured between
the last element of the first turn, and the first element of the
responding turn, whether it be a particle such as well or uhm, or
a lexical item. In breaths or clicks were also included as part of
the second turn.

Results
In the data we have examined for this paper, we commonly found
stretches of talk such as extract 1.
(1) Porch:2.1:866:PD2.
866

Kat:

867
868

Dap:

->

869
870

871
872

->
Kat:

->
Dap:

Jurarrba ngayu ngawukuku.hh
Hot
1Sg
pregnant.belly
I’m angry
(1.3)
Jurarrba >ninji< ngawukuka.
Hot
2Sg
pregnant.belly
You’re angry
(2.3)
((Daphne drinks from bottle))
‘ana:nkuny’ wawarrany’.
DEM-DAT child-DAT
With those kids
(2.2)
Barri balba yali; = bukamba na, (0.3)
Barri go 3Pl-PAST all NA
They’ve all gone

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

873

874
875
876
877

Dap:

->
Hil:
->
Dap:

wi:jba ‘li k‘ngkarr’; = s:choolyurri.
return 3Pl-PAST up school-ALL
they’ve gone back up to school
(4.5)
Mm: ∧ hm.
(0.5)
Barri[wa.
Barriwa
Finished/Anyway

Extract 1 occurred at Robinson River while the three women were
sitting quietly alone, mostly without eye contact, though occasionally turning to each other. Two of the women are sitting next
to each other, facing the house at an angle. The third is sitting at
an angle of about 90◦ to the other two, behind them and facing
away from the building, and two (Katelin and Daphne) remained
in these positions for the whole of the 2 h of the recording, with
Hilda arriving after about 40 min. To obtain eye contact with each
other, they needed to turn their heads 30◦ or more. The video for
extract 1 shows Katelin fiddling with small unidentified objects
in her lap, Daphne with a bottle of drink, and Hilda stroking a
coolamon8 . At times such activities lead to what Goodwin (1981,
p. 106) has called “activity-occupied withdrawal” from the talk,
by which he meant activities such as writing, preparing food,
grooming, attending to equipment or other artifacts (Goodwin,
1981, 1994, 1995a). In the Borroloola and Porch conversations
such activities mostly did not appear to disrupt the talk, occurring during both talk and silences. Some other activities, however,
namely drinking, smoking, coughing and nose blowing, were
potential talk inhibitors9 .
Between each turn in this extract (except the last two), there
are gaps of silence of between 1.3 and 4.5 s, and there is no evidence, either auditory or visual, that the participants experience
any problem with the talk, nor are they engaged in other activities, apart from fiddling with small objects in their hands and, in
line 869, during the 2.3 s pause in line 869, Daphne drinking from
a bottle.

Orienting to the Rules of Turn-Taking
So what is happening here to the notion of orientation to TRPs
and gap minimization? An initial point is that this has nothing to do with a different set of turn-taking rules. As Sidnell
(2001) found for Caribbean Creole conversations, the turn-taking
system in the conversations of these Garrwa speakers has the
same fundamental organization as that described for American
and British conversation. These women routinely speak when
selected. They self-select when they are not selected. They sometimes respond with precision timing at TRPs, orienting to possible completion points of TCUs. In extract 2, Tina selects Ellen
as next speaker by asking her a question (rule 1a). Ellen responds
in “unmarked next position” (i.e., with one beat of silence) when
she is asked a question by Tina.
8 A coolamon

is a vessel made of bark or wood for carrying water, babies etc.
activities in the Robinson River conversation which either were seen to
accompany talk, or in our judgment could do so, were: shaking an asthma inhaler,
waving away flies, wiping away sweat with a towel, rolling small objects on the lap
or thigh, putting objects into a handbag, scratching, brushing hair, and opening or
closing a bottle, as well as peering out into the surroundings.
9 Other

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 166

Gardner and Mushin

(2) Garrwa3-.20.8.03:V3:37:0′ 30′′

In extract 3, in line 60, Tina selects Ellen as next speaker
under rule 1a, by initiating repair with “Who.” Ellen latches her
response to this repair initiation. It can also be noted, however,
that the gap between Ellen’s question and Tina’s repair initiation
is almost twice as long as the average for English conversations
(Kendrick, 2015).
(3) Garrwa3-10.10.03:V3:58:1′ 00′′

Expanded transition spaces

(6) Garrwa3:20.8.03:V3:268:5′ 05′′

A further example of self-selection at a point of possible TCU
completion occurs in extract 7, which is from the Porch data.
Daphne is asking a passing girl to get her mother to bring some
fish and chips. Daphne gets two responses to her request, one
from the girl, and subsequently one from one of the other older
women, Hilda.
(7) -Porch-2.10:1220:1′ 00′′

Self-selection under rule 1b can also occur with no gap. In extract
4, Tina announces that she had been dreaming, which does
not select Ellen as a next speaker. Ellen then self-selects, on a
non-related topic, latching her own remembering to Tina’s turn.
(4) Garrwa:8.9.03-V3:18:0′ 25′′

There are also cases of turn starts in terminal overlap, that
is, early in the transition space. In extract 5, Daphne observes
that two people are cooking a kangaroo, and Katelin notes how
they are cooking it, overlapping with the last part of Daphne’s
turn.
(5) Porch2.8:614:0′ 30

At a point when the second of these responses, by Hilda, is possibly complete, after “e bin gawn” (she’s gone), Daphne asks a
follow-up question, “when.”10 However, it turns out that there is
more to come in Hilda’s turn: “tuh docter” (to the doctor). This is
an example of what Jefferson (1984) calls latched overlap, which
occurs because Daphne has not predicted the extension of Hilda’s
turn.
In these conversations we also find examples of the occurrence rule 1c, in which a current speaker continues when no
other speaker has self-selected under rule 1b. In extract 8, Katelin
requests that the other two women start talking more as she has
been doing most of the talking so far (this is for the benefit of the
recording of the talk), as she is tired. There is no evidence in the
video that she is directing her request at only one of the women
through, for example, gaze selection. Katelin comes to a TRP at
the end of line 846, with grammatical, intonational and pragmatic
completion (cf. Ford and Thompson, 1996). There is no response
within 0.4 s, at which point Katelin continues her turn with an
account for her tiredness.
(8) Porch:2.8:845:3′ 50′′

Another example of self-selection under rule 1b occurs in extract
6. In this example, in which they are talking to a man who is
passing by, both Tina and Ellen self-select in 272 and 273, after
0.2 s, which is the later end of the transition space. Tina is first
starter, which, under rule 1b, means she has rights to the floor.
Ellen, the second starter, drops out, but then restarts (line 274)
immediately Tina finishes her turn, latching her talk to the end of
Tina’s talk, just as predicted by the Sacks et al. (1974) turn-taking
rules.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

10 It

is possible that Daphne is responding late to the girl’s turn in line 1223, but
even were this so, the precision timing of Daphne’s “when,” latched to a point of
possible completion, remains.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 167

Gardner and Mushin

In extract 9, from one of the Borroloola conversations, we
present two examples of rule 1c, in this case both clashing with
1b. This clash occurs because a self-selecting speaker comes
in rather late—at the end or even beyond the “normal” transition space—at the same time as a current speaker elects to
continue.

Expanded transition spaces

turn, and 0.2 s after Tina finishes, Ellen restarts the turn she had
abandoned.
In the final example in this section, extract 10 presents a
sequence that can clearly be seen as potentially problematic, in
the sense that a question is asked that never gets answered. However, there is no evidence from the talk or from the video that
the participants orient to it as particularly problematic, not even
Hilda, who asks the question.
(10) Porch2.7:545:4′ 30′′

(9) Garrwa3:20.8.03:94:1′ 40′′

In line 98, Tina produces a newsmarker, which appears to be
seeking confirmation that it was the young man who did the
chasing. In response, Ellen makes reference to his mother11 .
After 0.2 s, which would be at the end of the normal transition space for British and American conversation (Wells and
Macfarlane, 1998), there is a simultaneous start with Ellen
repeating “mudder,” and Tina producing a confirming repetition, “im mudder.” As these two turns were produced simultaneously, it is now equivocal who, at the simultaneous start
that follows in 102-3, is current speaker and who is next: in
effect both are current speakers, so both, after a long transition space of 1.6 s, elect to continue, Tina continuing the
same sequence with “E mudder deh,” and Ellen moving on to
something new. However, Ellen drops out, Tina completes her
11 It is unclear to us who the “mother” is who is being referred to here, and why
she is being referred to. It is a common practice in Aboriginal communities for
reference to persons to be indirect or vague (Blythe, 2009; Garde, 2003). This phenomenon can be explained, at least in part, because they live in small communities
in which everyone knows everyone else, but also because there are kinship related
taboos on naming certain persons directly. Be that as it may, following Tina’s repair
initiating “Yindi” in line 98, there is a sequence in which the reference appears to be
resolved to the satisfaction of Tina. The point we are making in this extract about
turn-taking practices following Sacks et al. (1974) rules holds despite the reference
to “mother” remaining unclear.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Hilda twice pursues an answer, following the rule 1c according to
which if no other speaker self-selects then current speaker may
continue. This happens in lines 547 and 549, but after these two
attempts, she gives up. Throughout this extract, Hilda is gazing to her right at 40◦ toward Daphne, while the latter is fiddling with the cap on her bottle of soft drink, and the sound
of gas escaping is audible. This suggests she may be preoccupied, (as is Katelin—not the addressee—who is brushing her
hair). However, fiddling with a bottle cap is not an activity that
would necessarily inhibit Daphne from answering Hilda’s question. After the first question, Daphne glances at Hilda, but there
is no response during a gap of 7 s. There is also evidence that
Daphne has heard the second question, because toward the end
of line 547, she turns her head toward Hilda, holds her gaze
briefly, and then returns it to her drink bottle during the 2.6 s
silence that follows. Then there is increment to this question in
line 549, “Nuyiburri nanyi” (from the valley) and again nothing
for 1.1 s, which is when Daphne does produce a turn, which,
however, is not a response to the question, but a complaint
about sitting in the sun. It is also notable that Hilda does nothing to show that she finds the lack of an answer to her question problematic, apart from twice pursuing the answer before
dropping it.
These examples demonstrate that these Garrwa women can,
and regularly do (though as extract 10 shows, not invariably), orient to projectably complete units of talk, the turn-taking rules,
and transition places, as explicated in Sacks et al. (1974). What,
then, is going on when there are regular long silences between
turns in these conversations?

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 168

Gardner and Mushin

Accounting for Long Silences and Expanded
Transition Spaces
We have reported so far that in our data longer gaps between
turns are common. There are, however, striking differences in
the length of silences between the “current-speaker-selects-next”
(1a) and “next-speaker-self-selects” (1b) techniques. This may
not be surprising, but this is another feature that shows that Garrwa speakers are conducting their conversation in a similar way
to English conversationalists. When a current speaker selects a
next, the response tends to come relatively quickly, though with
a longer delay than has been observed in other languages. In all
of the examples examined from our Garrwa corpus, silences after
speaker selection occur regularly up to 1.5 s (Mushin and Gardner, 2009). In contrast, when no next speaker has been selected,
the gaps can be much longer. In this section, we examine some
extracts in which current speaker selects next, and following
that, we consider some cases in which no next speaker has been
selected.

Expanded transition spaces

sequence)12 . This contrasts with a typical preferred response in
“Western” talk, where such a response tends to come quickly and
briefly, without accounts or other expansions (Schegloff, 2007:
67ff).
The broader context of this adjacency pair is that it occurs
during a reminiscing sequence about how in the old days they
used to collect waterlilies to eat. This may help explain another
feature of this sequence, namely that this is on the face of
it an information-seeking question, which in English mostly
attracts a brief, phrasal response (Fox and Thompson, 2010), but
here we have an extended response—which is further extended
beyond this adjacency pair (not shown), so this WH-question
could be seen as a prompt for extending the reminiscing. Planning for an extended response may be a factor in the delay of
1.4 s.
Extract 12 is from the Borroloola corpus. There is no video to
support the analysis, but this is included as an example of another
delayed answer with a preferred response, with no perceptible
trouble.

Silences After Selection of Next Speaker

(12) Garrwa-9.10.03:V3:99:1′ 30′′

As was noted above, silences occurring when a current speaker
selects the next are of a very different order to silences when the
next speaker self-selects. According to Sacks et al. (1974), if a current speaker has selected the next speaker, there is an obligation
for the selected participant to speak as early as possible at the next
transition space. If no next speaker has been selected, then no
such obligation exists.
On some occasions the TRP may be “expanded,” for example because of activity-occupied withdrawal, or a dispreferred
response. However, on many occasions in the Garrwa conversations, when a current speaker has selected a next under rule 1a,
there is a gap preceding even a preferred response. Regularly, but
not always, these silences are “filled” with relevant gestures, such
as head nods which precede the talk, and there is thus no delay in
the response in such cases. On others, there is no talk-supporting
activity. There is a delay of 1.4 s in extract 11 between the question
and answer.

In extract 13, the silence cannot be accounted for even in part
by non-talk activities or delays associated with a dispreferred
response. Hilda repeats an answer that she had already provided once, namely that wild honey can be found at Hubblestrap. Daphne and Hilda have eye contact, with Daphne’s neck
“torqued” almost 90◦ toward Hilda (Schegloff, 1998). They are
clearly focused on talking to each other.
(13) Porch2.10:1282:2′ 00′′ :IR-5:2′ 13′′

(11) Porch:2.1:1002:IR-4:1′ 35′′

This is a case in which there is no gestural support of the talk.
Katelin and Hilda are both looking at Daphne whilst she is asking
the question. During the question and the 1.4 s silence, Katelin
and Daphne have eye contact, though Katelin is fiddling with her
collar, which is not an activity that necessarily precludes simultaneous talk. There is nothing in this sequence that indicates any
trouble, nor does Katelin appear to have her attention on any
other matter. The answer, when it comes, is preferred, though
it is expanded (and it is expanded further beyond this short

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

12 The

vagueness of “they used to” in response to a “who” question in line 1006
reflects a common practice in Indigenous Australian talk of vague person reference (eg., Garde, 2003; Blythe, 2013). This may in part have to do with the small,
close-knit communities in which everyone knows everyone else. It may also have
to do with taboos, where naming of certain kin is forbidden (Blythe, 2013). This
issue is beyond the scope of this paper.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 169

Gardner and Mushin

Between the answer that Hilda had given in 1225 in extract seven
and this sequence, the three women had been talking to two boys
who had arrived where they were sitting. Daphne then turns her
head sharply toward Hilda in 1279 with a summons (the “Mum”
in 1279 is a term of address directed at Hilda), which has the
effect of Hilda repeating her answer, that the sugarbag is at Hubblestrap, and Daphne then asks for more specific information
with “yangkawa” (whereabouts). There is a delay of 1.7 s between
the repair initiation in 1286 and the response in 1288. What happens in this silence is fully oriented to the answer. Hilda turns
her head slowly in a westerly direction (away from Daphne), and
this takes up the whole 1.7 s, and then nods in that direction as
she says “Righd where dem grid.” There is no hurry to start talking. The head turn prepares for the answer, and is accomplished
prior to the verbal response. This languid response contrasts with
the general practice in English (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987)
and Japanese (Kita and Ide, 2007) conversation, where it is most
usual for the gesture and talk to occur very quickly after the
prior turn, with the gesture slightly foreshadowing the words
(Streek, 1993).
In the next extract Daphne urges the other two to hurry up
so they can leave. Her directive in line 894 receives no immediate compliance from the other two. Indeed, first Hilda and
then Katelin concur, but with substantial gaps of 1.2 and 2.4 s,
respectively.
(14) Porch:2.8:894:4′ 40′′ :IR-3:4′ 12′′

This is an agreeing sequence, that is, each turn is a preferred
next: both recipients say they want to go to eat something, but
neither shows any sign of complying with Daphne’s directive
by getting ready to leave. There is no observable ambient or
interactional reason visible in the video for the delays between
these turns. However, rather than the immediate or even early
responses to preferreds that are reported in the literature (Levinson, 1983; Pomerantz, 1984a; Schegloff, 2007), there are substantial delays here. Daphne is waving away flies and then she picks
up a small object and shakes it: but she does this after she has
spoken. Hilda is stroking a coolamon throughout this sequence,
but this is not an activity that interferes with the ability to talk.
Daphne is urging them to quick action, so what better illustration
of the slower pace of the talk could there be than this languorous
hurrying up?
We can see from the examples presented in this section
that sometimes when the current speaker selects next, the
response occurs relatively promptly, mostly within about a
second-and-a-half (see Mushin and Gardner, 2009 for a more
detailed discussion), whilst others (not presented) have delays

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Expanded transition spaces

of less than a second. The metric with a maximum of about a
second-and-a-half is similar to what Scollon and Scollon (1981,
p. 25) claimed for Athabaskan. This metric is about half a second longer than Jefferson (1989) found for the American, British,
and Dutch conversations she studied, where there was a “standard maximum silence” of about 1 s (0.9–1.2) for various kinds
of silence. The longer silences she found could be accounted
for by activities the participants were engaged in that interfered
with the flow of the conversations. For these Garrwa conversations, there may be grounds for amending Jefferson’s observation
about waiting for 1 s to: “Whatever one might meant by “waiting long enough,” waiting beyond one-and-a-half seconds after
one has been selected is waiting too long” [adapted from Jefferson
(1986), p. 179]. In the next section, we shall discuss gaps of silence
between turns where there is no selection of next speaker by the
current speaker.

Silences Before Self-Selection by Next Speaker
The metric of a maximum silence of one and a half seconds
appears to apply only to turn transitions in which next speaker
has been selected by current speaker, but not to self-selection in
turn-by-turn talk. This can be partly explained by the fact that
where there has been no selection of next speaker, there is no
obligation for anyone to speak. A gap may ensue, and can extend
until there is a lapse in the conversation and speakers disengage.
In many cases in the Garrwa conversations, however, inter-turn
silences of several seconds occur without any apparent orientation to a problem in the talk, nor any indication from changes
in body posture that the conversation has lapsed. Some of these
gaps can be explained in the same way as those discussed earlier: sometimes non-talk activities, or dispreferreds, or the ends
of sequences and topic attrition occur in conjunction with longer
silences. On other occasions, however, such factors do not appear
to elucidate the silences.
In extract 15, which is from the beginning of the Porch conversation, there is very little non-talk activity from the three women:
Katelin scratches her foot, and Daphne appears to wave away
a fly, but otherwise they are sitting and looking mostly straight
ahead, without eye contact. They do not appear to pay much
attention to the barking dog, except for Hilda’s question about
it in line 8.
(15) Porch:2.6:001

13 A humpy is a small temporary

shelter.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 170

Gardner and Mushin

In the above extract, there is no topic that they are pursuing.
They’ve been sitting around for a long time before this point in
the conversation. There is no strong engagement. They move
in desultory fashion from topic to topic, commenting on what
is going on around them—a dog barking, a group of people
approaching. Reference by Katelin to a “humpy” (temporary shelter) is followed by 5.2 s of silence. The talk in lines 3–4 is followed
by a silence of 4.3 s. Daphne then self-selects with an observation that something is round the back. 1.6 s later, Hilda asks a
question which does not get answered. 1.7 s after this, Katelin
then observes and comments on some people approaching. Half
a second later Hilda mentions the presence of a pig nearby.
In contrast to extract 15, where there is little topical continuity between the turns, in the next extract, the gaps—even the 7.6 s
in line 115—are all between turns that are coherent self-selecting
contributions in the flow of the talk.
(16) Garrwa2-9.10.03-V2:111: 1′ 45′′

Expanded transition spaces

In the first part of this extract, all of the talk is by Tina, with
no hearable responses from Ellen, although there appears to be
no reason why Ellen could not have self-selected. This is not a
storytelling, although Tina’s first turns refer to a recent event in
the town. They have been exchanging views about people. None
of these turns selects a next speaker, there is no competition for
the floor, no sense of having to get the next turn in “now and not
later,” and neither participant shows any urgency in producing
a next turn. Two of the silences could be analyzed as intraturn
silences, namely the ones in line in line 113 and 119, each of
which is an increment to Tina’s prior talk. But even so, the prior
talk in each case ends at a possible TRP, and thus speaker change
is relevant. For the talk that comes after the 7.2 s silence in line
115, however, it is harder to analyse this as an intraturn silence,
as what precedes it is potentially complete, and what follows is
not an increment. The talk flows topically, and could have been
produced as a coherent multi-unit turn without any silences. Furthermore, there is no aural evidence of any other activity during
this silence.
In this section we have looked at inter-turn gaps that occur
when no next speaker has been selected. We have found that
there are numerous gaps in these positions, and some of them
are very long. The extracts presented here are ordinary conversation, and some of the languor of the talk here can be explained by
non-talk activity or dispreferred actions. However, most of these
non-talk activities are grooming or fiddling with objects, activities
that could accompany talk, in contrast for example, to reading
or writing, which require more focused attention. In very many
sequences in these conversations, the inescapable observation is
that this talk is inherently languorous, and there is no attempt
at minimization of gaps in the way that has been described for
English conversation, for example in Sacks et al. (1974). Very
long silences, or lapses, are not frequent, as we have only three
silences of longer than 10 s in our corpus14 . Furthermore, gaps
of more than 2 or 3 s are not common. We do find overwhelming evidence of an orientation by these speakers to the rules of
turn-taking as presented in Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson. The
difference from most published literature on turn-taking is one of
the “value of variables” (Schegloff, 2007, p. 74). It is a difference to
one of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s gross observations: “transitions (from one turn to the next) with no gap and no overlap are
common. Together with transitions characterized by slight gap or
slight overlap, they make up the vast majority of transitions” (pp.
700–701). In many sections of these conversations, the majority
of transitions are, in contrast, characterized by substantial gaps.

Extended Gaps in Conversation in Other
Contexts
An easy explanation of the phenomenon we are reporting in this
paper would be one of cultural difference: that Aboriginal Australians have a different “conversational style.” Whilst we have
found regular lack of gap minimization in these conversations,
there is no evidence in the data of a different set of turn-taking
14 Unfortunately

these are all in the Borroloola audio-only data, so they cannot be
checked for what the participants were doing during the silences.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 171

Gardner and Mushin

rules for these speakers. As Sidnell (2001) noted in his study on
Caribbean Creole conversations, “[t]here is, at time of writing, no
empirical study which provides evidence that humans do conversation in a fundamentally different way” (1286). We provide
no evidence for this either. Our study provides another example of a non-Western culture in which the fundamental organization of conversation appears to be “grounded in a speciesspecific adaptation to the contingencies of human social intercourse” (Sidnell, 2001, p. 1263). The difference is only that regularly there is a marked expansion of what counts, at least in
Western conversation, as a normal transition place.
In fact, the slow pace of these conversations is not, on the
evidence we have, culture–specific. We have some evidence that
expanded transition spaces occur in “western” talk. In the data
used by the first author for his work on response tokens (Gardner,
2001), there are examples of slow-paced conversations amongst
Anglo-Australian couples who recorded themselves when they
were at home alone. These are intimates, engaged in talk at times
of day when the pressure is off, such as after the evening meal.
There are times in these conversations that look and sound very
similar to the Garrwa conversations. In extract 18, there are some
very long gaps, including one of 4.3 s in line 163 following a
question from Liz, that is, after she has selected Mel as next
speaker.

Expanded transition spaces

164 might suggest that Mel is still engaged in reading—which
would be an explanation for the long gap—but still, overall, the
pace here is slow, and there is little attempt to minimize gaps.
In extract 19, Ike and Jan are driving, and are discussing who
is going to have the car later.
(19) I&JW4a

(18) L&MC2ai-Languorous:144

In the early part of this extract, Mel appears to be reading the
television schedule for the evening in a newspaper, an example
of “activity-occupied withdrawal,” with interspersed comments
on programs. In the latter part, though, there are questions and
answers, and the slow pace continues. The rustling newspaper in

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

This conversation was recorded during a quite lengthy car journey. It begins with a proposal by Ike that he go into work in
the evening, which gets a less than enthusiastic response from
Jan. What follows is a series of proposals and counter-proposals
and accompanying accounts. What is notable and relevant to this
paper are the silences between turns in this sequence of up to 4 s.
The extended interturn silences of these Anglo-Australian
conversations provide evidence that slow-paced talk is not
restricted to cultures or societies such as the Garrwa people, or the
Native American Warm Springs indigenous people that Philips
(1983) reported on. We certainly have not found in these materials, as Philips (1976) claimed for the Warm Spring Indians,
that turn-taking by their system was self-directed, or that anyone who wanted to speak did so and for as long as they wanted
(Philips did not provide closely transcribed materials to back up
her claim.). There are further situations in which talk characterized by expanded transition spaces is normal: second language
classroom talk (from the first author’s data), second language
conversations (Wong, 2000), and perhaps most extremely in hypnosis sessions (Demosthenous, 2008). In the last of these, gaps of
more than 10 s regularly occur between a hypnotist’s question and
a client’s answer whilst in deep hypnosis.
What may be happening in these Garrwa conversations (and
in the other interactions for which expanded transition spaces
have been reported) is that a lack of gap minimization occurs with
a greater frequency than has generally been reported in the Conversation Analysis literature. These interactions differ from those
that have provided the data for many Conversation Analysis studies, in which the speakers are at dinner parties, are on the phone,
are in animated groups engaged in lively discussion.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 172

Gardner and Mushin

Expanded transition spaces

Discussion

only tolerated, but are common. In addition, these women have
little to do. They sit around for hours at a time, passing the
time of day in conversation. Conversations involving intimates
in familiar surroundings, with a lack of pressure to talk may in
fact be at least as pertinent as cultural difference in accounting
for expanded transition spaces.
More specific and local reasons for delays in responding, as
some of the examples in the current study suggest, may be “disengagement or lack of attention” (Levinson, 2010), the “activityoccupied withdrawal” that Goodwin (1981) notes, such as brushing one’s hair, or seeking something in a handbag. Our analyses
also point to the possibility that there is less urgency to respond if
a next speaker has not been selected than if they have. Further, but
generally less amenable to verification, if a next speaker lacks the
knowledge to respond, it is likely that a response may be delayed,
or a non-complying response may transpire, or there may be no
response at all. Such local factors may then be in play with the
wider overall structure of the encounters noted above, and when
these local conditions occur during a “non-focused gathering,”
the frequency of longer gaps between turns may increase.
We do not feel confident to claim that these longer gaps
can be explained by culture or ethnicity, even if there is growing evidence that there may be a greater tolerance (or at least
occurrence) of longer gaps in some cultures or language groups
than others. If gaps are indeed more frequent in some cultures
than others, such as Garrwa (and other Indigenous Australian
languages) or 6=Ākhoe Hai||om (Hoymann, 2010), spoken in
Namibia, it may be that the more traditional life style in very
remote areas with relatively little contact to the modern, industrial world does not fully explain the slower pace of conversation,
but rather that in such traditional or semi-traditional societies or
communities, the people are more likely to live their lives at a
slower tempo, in more “non-focused gatherings,” and less “tightly
organized exchanges of doings.” In the conversations we have
examined, the old women sit around for hours. They have few
appointments to meet, nowhere much to go, little pressure to do
anything. They are in familiar surroundings, where they live in
close proximity to and know everyone else, as in an extended
family. But also they are sitting outside, where people are passing, there are things to watch and notice. Much of the time they
are loosely engaged with each other. Life’s pace is slow. Conversation is slow. Nevertheless, when the occasion demands, they
are perfectly capable of fast-paced conversation, and can provide
responses with no gap and no overlap.
As Schegloff (2000) has noted,

In the Stivers et al. (2009) study of turn-taking practices across
10 languages, key findings were that there is a general avoidance
of simultaneous talk and a minimization of gaps between turns.
However, they did find a variation in the length of average gaps
of 0.25 s across these languages, leading them to conclude that
the fundamental turn taking mechanisms are universal, with differences between languages being only quantitative. While the
methods used for our study and its primary focus are different
from theirs, and thus preclude any direct comparison, our findings do broadly support those of Stivers et al. Using the same corpus as for the current study, Mushin and Gardner (2009) noted
that approximately 50% of silences in the Garrwa conversations
were over 0.9 s, and Gardner (2010), also working with the same
corpus, but focusing only on question-answer turns (N = 62),
found the average gap between question and answer to be 0.75 s,
about half as long again as the longest average silences found
in a similar environment for any language in the Stivers et al.
study15 . These findings provide further support for the claim that
there is some cultural variation in the timing of responses and of
next turns generally, but some caution needs to be expressed in
making this claim.
In his responses to Stivers and Rossano (2010), on why there
may be delays longer than predicted by Sacks et al. (1974), or
even no response at all, Schegloff (2010) makes the point that
participants in these conversations may be in “continuing states
of incipient talk” (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973). Couper-Kuhlen
(2010) makes a similar point, reminding us of Goffman’s distinction between “focused” and “non-focused” gatherings, with the
latter displaying a lack of “tightly organized exchange of doings,”
and thus perhaps less urgency to produce second pairs parts or,
one might add, less urgency to avoid extended silences between
turns. Such situations might include “members of a household
in their living rooms, employees who share an office, passengers together in an automobile” (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973, pp.
324–325), or, one might further add, old ladies sitting for hours
on the porch of a house in the heat of the day. Indeed, the
examples from white Australian couples’ conversation, where at
times similarly long gaps between turns to those in the Garrwa
conversations were found, provide some support for Schegloff ’s
and Couper-Kuhlen’s observations. In reference to some of the
long silences in her data, Jefferson (1989) muses that there may
be a “‘relaxation” of certain “rules” among intimates’ (p. 192).
She is referring here specifically to a speaker completing another
speaker’s turn, where that other speaker is a spouse or sibling.
Something similar may be going on in these Garrwa conversations, namely a relaxation of rules amongst intimates where gaps
are not minimized. The women in our data grew up together,
so are more like family than close friends (in fact, Hilda and
Daphne are sisters-in-law); they have lived in small communities
in close proximity to each other for many years. Long silences
between turns—gaps that do not transform into lapses—are not
15 Gardner

(2010) also found that 45% of questions were never answered, which is
higher than any of the ten languages investigated by Stivers et al. (2009), which was
Korean at 36%.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

nothing special rests on the “one-at-a-time” proposal. Should a
compelling demonstration of a different way of organizing participation in conversation be provided, it would allow us to seek a
more general account that could subsume both one-at-a-time and
its alternative(s) as special cases
(p. 47).

The materials presented here in many ways suggest no more than
was already accounted for in Sacks et al. (1974) under rule 1c,
and some subsequent notes on this rule on how discontinuous
talk emerges. If no speaker selects next speaker, no potential next

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 173

Gardner and Mushin

Expanded transition spaces

speaker self-selects, and current speaker chooses not to continue,
then a gap develops. Such gaps may occur more or less regularly,
and develop into shorter or longer gaps, and extend further or
less far toward lapses. In some conversations, with some participants, in some low-pressure situations, and perhaps even in some
cultures, it may be the case that the option not to continue under
1c is exercised more regularly, and that once the transition space
has passed, the floor opens up to anyone to self-select as next
speaker. This could even be posited as a “lowest order rule” of
turn-taking: if current speaker chooses not to continue speaking
under rule 1c, then after closure of the regular transition space,
any speaker may self-select at any time, first speaker to self-select
gaining rights to speak. Where the option not to continue speaking is regularly exercised, then the gross observation for “one-ata-time” will not hold as a recurrent feature of such talk in such
circumstances.
There is one final point to be made. We have found that these
Garrwa speakers are quite capable of distributing their conversational turns in just the way that Sacks et al. (1974) described,
with next speaker selection, self-selection if a next speaker hasn’t
been selected, and continuation by the current speaker if no other
speaker has self selected. The turns in these Garrwa conversations
are constructed in units that are identifiable as TCUs, and there

is orientation to TRPs, albeit often extended ones. Apart from
Sidnell’s (2001) study of Caribbean Creole English and Tanaka’s
(2000) study of Japanese, there have been few studies about the
rules of turn-taking of languages other than English, particularly
of languages (and cultures) very different from English such as
Garrwa, that have shown that the fundamental rules of turntaking are followed as Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson describe.
Yet it is through studies such as these that we are able to enrich
our understanding of what is fundamental about human social
interaction.

References

Gardner, R. (2007). “Broken starts: bricolage in turn starts in second language talk,”
in Language Learning Teaching as Social Interaction, eds Z. Hua, P. Seedhouse,
L. Wei, and V. Cook (London: Palgrave), 58–71.
Gardner, R. (2010). Question and answer sequences in Garrwa talk. Aust. J.
Linguist. 30, 423–445. doi: 10.1080/07268602.2010.518554
Gardner, R., and Mushin, I. (2007). Post-start-up overlap and disattentiveness in
talk in a Garrwa community. Aust. Rev. Appl. Linguist. 30, 35.1–35.14. doi:
10.2104/aral0735
Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational Organization. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. Am. Anthropol. 96, 606–633.
Goodwin, C. (1995a). Seeing in depth. Soc. Stud. Sci. 25, 237–274.
Goodwin, C. (1995b). Co-constructing meaning in conversations with an aphasic
man. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 28, 233–260.
Goodwin, C., and Goodwin, M. (1987). Concurrent operations on talk: notes on
the interactive organization of assesments. Pap. Pragmatics 1, 1–54.
Hayashi, M. (2003). Language and the body as resources for collaborative action:
a study of word searches in Japanese conversation. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 36,
109–141. doi: 10.1207/S15327973RLSI3602_2
Hoymann, G. (2010). Questions and responses in 6=Ākhoe Hai||om. J. Pragmatics
42, 2726–2740. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.008
Jefferson, G. (1984). “Notes on some orderliness of overlap onset,” in Discourse
Analysis and Natural Rhetoric, eds V. D’Urso and P. Leonardi (Padua: Cleup
Editore), 11–38.
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on ‘latency’ in overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.
Jefferson, G. (1989). “Preliminary notes on a possible metric which provides for
a ’standard maximum’ silence of approximately one second in conversation,”
in Conversation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, eds D. Roger and P. Bull
(Clevedon: Multilingual Matters), 166–196.
Kendrick, K. (2015). The intersection of turn-taking and repair: the timing of other-initiation of repair in conversation. Front. Psychol. 6:250. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00250
Kendrick, K., and Torreira, F. (2014). The timing and construction of preference: a quantitative study. Discourse Process. doi: 10.1080/0163853X.2014.
955997. [Epub ahead of print].
Kita, S., and Ide, S. (2007). Nodding, aizuchi, and final particles in Japanese conversation: how conversation reflects the ideology of communication and social
relationships. J. Pragmatics 39, 1242–1254. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2007.02.009

Audacity Team. (2013). Audacity (R): Free Audio Editor and Recorder [Computer
program]. Version 2.0.5.0. Available online at: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
(Accessed October 19, 2013).
Blythe, J. (2009). “Prosodic person reference in Murriny Patha reported interaction,” in Where Prosody Meets Interaction, eds D. Barth-Weingarten, N. Dehe,
and A. Wichmann (Bingley: Emerald), 23–52.
Blythe, J. (2013). Preference organization driving structuration: evidence from
Australian Aboriginal interaction for pragmatically motivated grammaticalization. Language 89, 883–919. doi: 10.1353/lan.2013.0057
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2010). Commentary on Stivers and Rossano:“mobilizing
response.” Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 43, 32–37. doi: 10.1080/08351810903471282
Davidson, J. (1984). “Subsequent versions of invitations, offers, requests, and proposals dealing with potential or actual rejection,” in Structures of Social Action,
eds J. Maxwell Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge: CUP), 102–128.
Demosthenous, H. (2008). Turn-Taking in Hypnosis Session. Ph.D. thesis, Griffith
University, Brisbane.
Eades, D. (2000). I don’t think it’s an answer to the question: silencing Aboriginal witnesses in court. Lang. Soc. 29, 161–195. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500
002013
Eades, D. (2007). “Understanding Aboriginal silence in legal contexts,” in Handbook of Intercultural Communication, eds H. Kotthoff and H. Spencer-Oatey
(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), 285–301.
Ford, C., and Thompson, S. (1996). “Interactional units in conversation: syntactic,
intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. Schegloff, and S. Thompson (Cambridge:
CUP), 134–184.
Fox, B. (2007). Principles in shaping grammatical practices: an exploration. Discourse Stud. 9, 299–318. doi: 10.1177/1461445607076201
Fox, B. A., and Thompson, S. A. (2010). Responses to wh-questions
in English conversation. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 43, 133–156. doi:
10.1080/08351811003751680
Garde, M. (2003). Social Deixis in Bininj Gun-wok. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
University of Queensland.
Gardner, R. (2001). When Listeners Talk: Response Tokens and Recipient Stance.
Pragmatics and Beyond Series. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Garrwa people who contributed to
this project, both in allowing us to record them, and in working with us on the transcriptions. Funding support for this
project came from Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies grant GO5/7053 Garrwa language
project and the University of Queensland. Ethical clearance
for the collection of audio and video recordings was given
by the University of Queensland Behavioral and Social Sciences Ethical Review Committee (2006000745 Garrwa Language
Project).

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 174

Gardner and Mushin

Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.
Levinson, S. (2010). Questions and responses in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island. J. Pragmatics 42, 2741–2755. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.
04.009
Moerman, M. (1988). Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis.
Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mushin, I., and Gardner, R. (2009). Silence is talk: conversational silence in
Australian Aboriginal talk-in-interaction. J. Pragmatics 40, 2033–2052. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2008.11.004
Mushin, I., and Gardner, R. (2011). “Turn management in Garrwa mixed-language
conversations,” in Language and Social Identity in Indigenous Commmunities: Papers Presented to Michael Walsh on the Occasion of his Retirement,
eds B. Baker, M. Harvey, I. Mushin, and R. Gardner (Canberra, ACT: Pacific
Linguistics).
Philips, S. (1976). Some sources of cultural variability in the regulation of talk.
Lang. Soc. 5, 81–95.
Philips, S. (1983). The Invisible Culture: Communication in Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservations. Prospect Heights, NY: Waveland.
Pomerantz, A. (1984a). “Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes,” in Structures of Social Action, eds
J. Maxwell Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge: CUP), 57–101.
Pomerantz, A. (1984b). “Pursuing a response,” in Structures of Social Action, eds J.
Maxwell Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge: CUP), 152–163.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735.
Schegloff, E. (1996). “Turn organization: one intersection of grammar and interaction,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. Schegloff, and S. Thompson
(Cambridge: CUP), 52–133.
Schegloff, E. (1998). Body torque. Soc. Res. 65, 535–596.
Schegloff, E. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for
conversation. Lang. Soc. 1, 1–63.
Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, E. (2010). Commentary on Stivers and Rossano:“mobilizing response.”
Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 43, 38–48. doi: 10.1080/08351810903471282
Schegloff, E. A., and Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 8, 289–327.
Scollon, R., and Scollon, S. (1981). Narrative, Literacy and Faith in Interethnic
Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Expanded transition spaces

Sidnell, J., and Stivers, T. (eds.). (2012). The Handbook of Conversation Analysis,
Vol. 121. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Sidnell, J. (2001). Conversational turn-taking in a Caribbean English Creole.
J. Pragmatics 33, 1263–1290. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00062-X
Sidnell, J. (2011). Conversation Analysis: An Introduction, Vol. 45. Chichester: John
Wiley & Sons.
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann,
T., et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.
0903616106
Stivers, T., and Robinson, J. (2006). A preference for progressivity in interaction.
Lang. Soc. 35, 367–392. doi: 10.1017/S0047404506060179
Stivers, T., and Rossano, F. (2010). Mobilizing response. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact.
43, 3–31. doi: 10.1080/08351810903471258
Streek, J. (1993). Gesture as communication 1: its coordination with gaze and
speech. Commun. Monogr. 60, 275–299.
Tanaka, H. (2000). Turn-Taking in Japanese Conversation: A Study in Grammar and
Interaction, Vol. 56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Walsh, M. (1991). Conversational styles and intercultural communication: an
example from northern Australia. Aust. J. Commun. 18, 1–12.
Wells, B., and Macfarlane, S. (1998). Prosody as an interactional resource: turnprojection and overlap. Lang. Speech 41, 265–294.
Wilson, T., and Zimmerman, D. (1986). The structure of silence between turns in
two-party conversation. Discourse Process. 9, 375–390.
Wong, J. (2000). Delayed next turn repair initiation in native/non-native
speaker English conversation. Appl. Linguist. 21, 244–267. doi: 10.1093/applin/
21.2.244
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Gardner and Mushin. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use,
distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 251 | 175

PERSPECTIVE
published: 14 April 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00450

Experience sharing, emotional
reciprocity, and turn-taking
Melisa Stevanovic* and Anssi Peräkylä
Finnish Centre of Excellence in Intersubjectivity in Interaction, Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, Helsinki,
Finland

Edited by:
Kobin H. Kendrick,
Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Beatrice S. Reed,
University of York, UK
Alexa Hepburn,
Loughborough University, UK
*Correspondence:
Melisa Stevanovic,
Finnish Centre of Excellence
in Intersubjectivity in Interaction,
Department of Social Research,
University of Helsinki, P.O.Box 4,
00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
melisa.stevanovic@helsinki.fi
Specialty section:
This article was submitted
to Language Sciences, a section
of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 19 November 2014
Accepted: 30 March 2015
Published: 14 April 2015
Citation:
Stevanovic M and Peräkylä A (2015)
Experience sharing, emotional
reciprocity, and turn-taking.
Front. Psychol. 6:450.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00450

In this perspective article, we consider the relationship between experience sharing and
turn-taking. There is much evidence suggesting that human social interaction is permeated by two temporal organizations: (1) the sequential framework of turn-taking and (2)
the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity. From this perspective, we introduce
two alternative hypotheses about how the relationship between experience sharing and
turn-taking could be viewed. According to the first hypothesis, the home environment
of experience sharing is in the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity, while the
motivation to share experiences is in tension with the sequential framework of turn-taking.
According to the second hypothesis, people’s inclination to coordinate their actions in
terms of turn-taking is motivated precisely by their propensity to share experiences. We
consider theoretical and empirical ideas in favor of both of these hypotheses and discuss
their implications for future research.
Keywords: turn-taking, emotion, experience sharing, emotional contagion, conversation analysis

Sequentiality and Concurrency in Human Social Interaction
In recent years, there has been an increasing number of conversation analytic studies explicating
the social organization of, and the highly ordered interactional tasks performed by, emotional
expressions in social interaction (e.g., Peräkylä and Sorjonen, 2012). This perspective paper seeks to
further this line of research by considering how expressions in the service of what we call experience
sharing are embedded in the most primordial temporal organizations of interaction.
Many naturally occurring interactions call for individuals to coordinate their actions in terms of
turn-taking. This happens especially in the context of language use: the principle of one participant
talking at a time (Sacks et al., 1974) allows humans to communicate complex thoughts and intentions.
In conversation, social actions (e.g., proposals, offers, and invitations) and their responses (e.g.,
acceptances and rejections) are organized in terms of successive turns at talk. As pointed out by
Schegloff (1988, pp. 98–99), turn-taking enables humans to pursue stable trajectories of action
and responsive action. This arrangement will be referred to as the sequential framework of turntaking. It denotes not only the temporal but also the conditional relationship between participants’
interactional moves.
In addition to the sequential framework of turn-taking, human interactive conduct is permeated
by another temporo-conditional arrangement—something that we call the concurrent framework
of emotional reciprocity. The literature on “emotional contagion” suggests that humans have an
automatic tendency to mimick other people’s non-verbal emotional expressions, which affects the
emotional experience of the mimicking person (Hatfield et al., 1993, 1994; Dimberg, 2007). This
happens as a result of afferent feedback generated by elementary motor mimicry, which produces
a simultaneous emotional match independently of people’s cognitive abilities to understand what is

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 450 | 176

Stevanovic and Peräkylä

going on in the mind of the other (Carr et al., 2003; Leslie et al.,
2004; Barresi and Moore, 2008; Decety and Meyer, 2008). From
this perspective, two participants’ interactional moves are, by
definition, connected by a causal relationship (one participant
produces an expression first and the other acts in response to
him/her), but the actions/expressions take place in a shared time.
Overlap of expressions is regular. Regarding the opportunity for
expression, the participants are positioned symmetrically, which
is reflected in the frequent concurrency of the participants’ interactional moves.
There are different motives that lead humans to interact with
each other. In addition to their instrumental communicative
goals, humans are also motivated to share experiences about
events and things in the environment with their significant others
and to become “swept along” by them (Feinman, 1982; Striano
and Rochat, 1999; Tomasello, 1999; Hobson and Hobson, 2008;
Rochat et al., 2009). This motivation has even been regarded as
the force that has driven the evolution of language (Locke, 1996,
2002; Dunbar, 1997). But how does experience sharing relate to
the sequential framework of turn-taking, where language use regularly takes place? Could it be that experience sharing is “at home”
in the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity, while being
in tension with turn-taking? Or, do humans cast their experience sharing into the system of turn-taking precisely because it
supports experience sharing? In what is to come, we will discuss
these two alternative hypotheses one after another, with the aim
of paving the way for future empirical research on the topic.

Hypothesis I: Experience Sharing
is in Tension with the Sequential
Framework of Turn-Taking
Our first hypothesis suggests that the home environment of
experience sharing is in the concurrent framework of emotional
reciprocity, while there is a tension between experience sharing
and the sequential framework of turn-taking.
The first pieces of support for this hypothesis come from the
developmental psychological research literature, which suggests
there to be automatic resonance processes that allow humans,
right from the outset, to bridge their own and others’ experiences.
With reference to neonatal imitation, Meltzoff and Brooks (2001)
have argued that, in reproducing the behavior of others, infants
automatically perceive others as “like me” and thus begin to
develop a sense of social connectedness, mutual recognition,
and shared experience. In other words, experience sharing has
been suggested to emerge “in the guise of emotional contagion”
(Brinck, 2008).
Another type of support for our first hypothesis comes from
adult interaction, and is provided by the temporal organization of
the instances of language use associated with experience sharing.
While language use may be anchored in the organization of turntaking (see e.g., Schegloff, 1996, 2006), still, there is much work
suggesting that the moments of experience sharing may be exceptional in this respect (Coates, 1994; Lerner, 2002; Pillet-Shore,
2012; Vatanen, 2014). In conversation analysis, a classic example
is provided by Goodwin and Goodwin (1987), who described the

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking

sharing of affective stances in the form of concurrent agreeing
assessments. Their example involves two conversationalists praising something a mutual friend has baked. One of them says: “Jeff
made an asparagus pie, it was so good.” In overlap with the first
speaker’s “so,” the co-interactant launches an assessment: “I love
it.” Hence, it appears that, in the moments of experience sharing,
the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity colonizes the
organization of spoken interaction, leading to the momentary
relaxation of turn-taking rules. Also studies within the domain
of mother-infant interaction have shown that positive affective
expressions tend to coincide with simultaneous vocalizations
(Stern et al., 1975; Beebe et al., 1979).
Besides overlapping talk, there are also other ways in which
experience sharing, as it were, “surpasses” turn-taking. Face is
central here. Speakers may use their facial displays to mark a
transition from affectively neutral talk to emotional experience
sharing in the middle of their ongoing turns at talk (cf. Iwasaki,
2011). Likewise, a recipient may display an emotional stance
toward an actional or a topical element in a speaker’s ongoing
turn at talk, thereby inviting the speaker to redirect her utterance
production (Kaukomaa et al., in press). Detailed considerations of
parallel uses of words and facial displays in moments of experience
sharing are thus particularly intriguing.
From this perspective, let us consider Example 1 (taken from
Peräkylä and Ruusuvuori, 2006), where one participant’s telling
(about a dress code that a mutual friend working in a newspaper
needed to conform to) is followed by a shared amusement of both
of the participants. Here, the onset and the completion of the
smiles take place with one party doing the first move and the other
party following. However, between these sequentially organized
boundary moves, the participants maintain simultaneous smiles,
embodying the sharing of experiences over a lengthy period
of time.
During the most part of the first speaker’s (B’s) telling (lines
1–6) both participants are looking down with straight faces
(Frame 1). At the end of the telling, however, they establish
mutual gaze and the teller (B) adopts a smiling face (Frame 2).
After a gap (line 7), the recipient (A) reciprocates the smile and
raises her brows (Frame 3), simultaneously producing an animated verbal response of “ritualized disbelief ” (Heritage, 1984,
p. 339; line 8). While the interaction has thus far abided to the
sequential framework of turn-taking, now, as soon as the mutual
smile has been established, the participants’ facial conduct gets
detached from the sequential organization of turn-taking as the
concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity breaks through.
During a moment of “heightened emotive involvement” (Selting,
1994), they maintain their smiles and mutual gaze over a number of turns conveying ostensibly different actions (assessment,
line 10; joking advice, line 11; Frame 4). The temporality of the
mutual smile goes beyond the turn-taking organization. After
this, the participants, however, break their mutual gaze (Frame 5),
which is followed by their smiles becoming less intensive. One
participant (A) adopts a straight face at the onset of her question (lines 13–14), while the other (B) does the same during
her answer to the question (line 15; Frame 6). Thereby, they
indicate that the heightened moment of experience sharing is
over. While the primary modality of expression surpassing the

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 450 | 177

Stevanovic and Peräkylä

turn-taking rules in Example 1 was facial expression, and the
organization of talk followed turn-taking rules, the overlapping
talk (lines 10–11) during the experience sharing should also be
acknowledged.
The idea of experience sharing being in tension with the
sequential temporality of turn-taking reverberates with certain
recent suggestions presented in the conversation analytic literature: Heritage (2011) has described the epistemic dilemmas associated with the “empathic moments in interaction” and Enfield
(2011) has suggested that it is turn-taking with its inherent
asymmetries that helps to account for the existence of such
dilemmas. But even if experience sharing would be in tension

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking

with turn-taking, this seems not to be the case for instrumental
communication. In her study on university subcommittee meetings, Edelsky (1981) observed that those participants who otherwise made frequent use of overlapping talk still abided to the
canonical turn-taking system when their talk was oriented toward
the official business of the meeting. The same phenomenon seems
to apply also for those emotional expressions that are used to
carry out different kinds of instrumental communicative tasks.
For example, Heath (1989) showed that, when patients in medical
consultations tried to legitimize medical attention to their ailment
through cries of pain, these expressions of suffering abided to the
organization of turn-taking.

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 450 | 178

Stevanovic and Peräkylä

The points detailed above suggest that the home environment for experience sharing might be in the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity, while experience sharing (unlike
instrumental communicative goals) may call for the participants
to depart from the sequential framework of turn-taking.

Hypothesis II: The Sequential Framework
of Turn-Taking Serves Experience Sharing
While our first hypothesis questions the relevance of turn-taking
for experience sharing, our second hypothesis represents just the
opposite view: it suggests that the sequential framework of turntaking is not in tension with experience sharing but, instead,
serves it.
Previously, we highlighted the significance of the automatic
resonance processes for experience sharing. However, it has been
pointed out that the mere reproduction of other people’s behaviors represents a closed loop system: it reflects what is already
out there (Rochat and Passos-Ferreira, 2008). So, for people
really to relate and share each other’s experiences more fully,
these automatic resonance processes need to be embedded in an
open system of contingent emotional reciprocity. It can thus be
argued that contingent emotional reciprocity, and thus also experience sharing, can be facilitated by the sequential framework of
turn-taking.
In human ontogeny, the first instantiations of contingent emotional reciprocity appear in the context of alternation between
approach and withdrawal tendencies (Beebe and Stern, 1977;
Hietanen et al., 2008). Infants have been shown occasionally visually to disengage from their interactive partners and then return
to the engagement. Often, this happens in a highly coordinated
fashion—that is, when one partner moves from a less engaged
phase to a more engaged phase, or vice versa, the other partner
responds with a corresponding change in the same direction.
Still, these changes are likely to take place within certain timelags (Cohn and Tronick, 1987). This gives the interaction a sense
of one person making a bid of engagement and another person
responding to that bid in a positive way.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking

In the subsequent development of the human infant, the experiences of contingent emotional reciprocity get more nuanced.
Already from 2 months on, infants and their caretakers start to
look and listen to each other more carefully; producing vocal,
facial and gestural responses elicited by the expressed feelings
and interests of their interaction partners (Spitz and Wolf, 1946;
Trevarthen, 1979; Stern, 1985; Cohn and Elmore, 1988; Rochat
and Passos-Ferreira, 2008). During these monitoring processes,
the infants gradually develop expectations for how the interaction is likely to proceed; for example, they learn to expect
that, following an emotional bid on their part, be it via a smile,
gaze, or frown, the other will respond in return (Sagi and Hoffman, 1976; Meltzoff and Moore, 1977; Wolff, 1987; Sroufe, 1996;
Rochat, 2001). Compared to the automatic resonance processes,
the reliance on social expectations is risky but, when successful,
likely to result in a powerful experience of shared emotion (Rochat
et al., 2009).
From this perspective, let us consider Example 2, where an
11-month-old girl, Nea, prompts a prominent instance of experience sharing. First, she looks at her parents, assuring their
attention. Thereafter, she puts a funny grimace on her face, thus
prompting her parents’ to laugh heartfeltly. Finally, she joins
in the laughter, expressing a high level of positive arousal. The
sharing of experience is organized in successive turns. This turntaking organization of sharing builds on the child’s capacity to
anticipate her significant others’ reactions to her behavior, while
there is a genuine possibility that the parents will not behave as
expected.
Example 2 demonstrates how a turn-taking structure, where
expressions are organized as distinct temporal units that follow
each other, provides for experiences of contingent emotional
reciprocity. By making a grimace, Nea, took on trust that her
parents would recognize what she was up to; in their “next turn”
(laughter), the parents displayed that they indeed did; and, the
correctness of the parents’ interpretation was confimed by Nea,
through her final laughter. Here, turn-taking enables the participants to establish meaningful linkages between their behaviors.
While each behavior occupies a forward-looking status, raising
expectations for what is to happen next (on conditional relevance,

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 450 | 179

Stevanovic and Peräkylä

Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking

see Schegloff, 2007, p. 20), each response to such behaviors occupies a backward-looking status as something that was invoked
by what just occurred (on the next-turn proof procedure, see
Sacks et al., 1974, pp. 728–729). It is thus the dynamic interplay between expectations and their overflowing satisfaction that
provides a scaffolding for a possible escalation of emotion displays (each participant endorsing the affective aspect of their
co-participants’ turns), which may generate particularly intensive
instances of experience sharing. Also the conversation analytic
research on emotional expression provides support for our second
hypothesis. This line of research has shown that the participants may refrain from the immediate reciprocation of contagious
emotional expressions, such as laughter and crying (Hepburn
and Potter, 2012; Shaw et al., 2013). Instead, these expressions
seem to be regulated by the turn-by-turn sequential organization
of interaction. For example, the recipients of complaint stories
(Couper-Kuhlen, 2012) and news deliveries (Maynard and Freese,
2012) have been shown to produce their emotional responses
at the completion of the news delivery or narrative, rather than
immediately after the tellers’ emotional displays. Likewise, surprise tokens such as wow, gosh, oh my good, ooh, phew have
been described as interactionally organized performances, interactional achievements, instead of automatic emotional eruptions
(Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2006; see also Heath et al., 2012). It
could be precisely the sensitivity of emotional expression to the
sequential framework of turn-taking that enables the participants
to display their willingness to grasp—as fully as possible—the
particular experience that their co-participants are about to
share.
Finally, we may turn the table around and ask whether experience sharing can also serve turn-taking. This possibility appears
relevant with reference to the Goffmanian idea of the ubiquitous
insecurity of people in social interaction—a theme that runs all
through his work (see e.g., Goffman, 1955; Rawls, 1987). In social
interaction, by every turn that a person takes, s/he claims being
worthy of other’s attention and calls for others to recognize this
claim (Goffman, 1955, pp. 9–10), while there is always a possibility that this claim will not be recognized by others (Stevanovic,
2015; Peräkylä, in press). The emotionally secure framework of
experience sharing with significant others, however, provides an
embarrassment-free site for the practicing of making such claims
and for the acquisition of the more asymmetric responsibilities
that the sequential framework of turn-taking enforces the participants to assume.
In sum, the coordination of actions in terms of turn-taking
enables forms of experience sharing that the concurrent organization could not afford. This suggests that one motivation underlying the human propensity to coordinate their actions in terms of
turn-taking could be the human propensity to share experiences.
Even more, there might be a bidirectional linkage of enhancement
between these two propensities.

Consequences for the Study of Turn-Taking

References

Beebe, B., and Stern, D. (1977). “Engagement-disengagement and early object experiences,” in Communicative Structures and Psychic Structures, eds N. Freedman
and S. Grand (New York: Plenum), 35–55. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4757-0492-1_3
Beebe, B., Stern, D., and Jaffe, J. (1979). “The kinesic rhythm of mother-infant
interactions,” in Of Speech and Time: Temporal Patterns in Interpersonal Contexts,

Barresi, J., and Moore, C. (2008). “The neuroscience of social understanding,” in The
Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, eds J. Zlatev, T. P. Racine, C. Sinha,
and E. Itkonen (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 39–66. doi: 10.1075/celcr.12.05bar

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

We have now considered two alternative hypotheses about how
the relationship between experience sharing and turn-taking
could be viewed. What consequences would these imply for the
study of turn-taking?
According to our first hypothesis, the home environment of
experience sharing is in the concurrent framework of emotional
reciprocity, while there is a tension between experience sharing
and the sequential framework of turn-taking. If this hypothesis is valid, then there must be evidence that, not only does a
lesser amount of experience sharing lead to a greater amount of
turn-taking, and vice versa, but also, that turn-taking obstructs
experience sharing. Furthermore, if turn-taking is there to facilitate instrumental communication (instead of experience sharing),
then we would expect that there would be a tension between
overlapping vocalizations and effective instrumental communication. While there is some evidence for the tension between
turn-taking and experience sharing (Enfield, 2011; Heritage, 2011;
Vatanen, 2014), the potentially problematic combination of overlapping vocalizations and effective instrumental communication
has rather been taken for granted than really unpacked through
empirical investigation (cf. Stevanovic and Frick, 2014). One
further challenge from the perspective of this hypothesis would
be to account for the occurrences of overlapping talk serving
instrumental purposes.
According to the second hypothesis, turn-taking is in the service of experience sharing. In allowing the participants to engage
in increasingly complex forms of joint action, and, hence, in ever
more exciting shared experiences, there seems to be no tension
between turn-taking and experience sharing. From this perspective, there seems to be a developmental continuity between the
early infant-caretaker interactions governed by emotional reciprocity and the later, more complex forms of social interaction.
If this hypothesis is valid, then there must be evidence that the
instances of experience sharing cast in the sequential framework
of turn-taking can, in principle, reach at least the same level of
intensity as those occurring in the context of overlapping talk.
Moreover, one would need to show that occurrences of experience
sharing and instrumental goal-pursuit would be relatively evenly
distributed between the instances of overlapping talk and talk
abiding to the norms of turn-taking.
No matter which of the above hypothese is more valid than
the other, the relationship between experience sharing and turntaking is something worth further investigation—something that
this paper has sought to highlight.

Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Academy of Finland (Decision
No. 274735).

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 450 | 180

Stevanovic and Peräkylä

eds A. Siegman and S. Feldstein (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates),
23–34.
Brinck, I. (2008). “The role of intersubjectivity in the development of intentional
communication,” in The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, eds J.
Zlatev, T. P. Racine, C. Sinha, and E. Itkonen (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 115–140.
doi: 10.1075/celcr.12.08bri
Carr, L., Iacoboni, M., Dubeau, M. C., Mazziotta, J. C., and Lenzi, G. L. (2003).
Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: a relay from neural systems for
imitation to limbic areas. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 5497–5502. doi:
10.1073/pnas.0935845100
Coates, J. (1994). “No gap, lots of overlap: turn-taking patterns in the talk
of women friends,” in Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context,
eds D. Graddol, J. Maybin, and B. Stierer (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters),
177–192.
Cohn, J. E., and Elmore, M. (1988). Effect of contingent changes in mothers’
affective expression on the organization of behavior in 3-month-old infants.
Infant Behav. Dev. 11, 493–505. doi: 10.1016/0163-6383(88)90008-2
Cohn, J. E., and Tronick, E. Z. (1987). Mother-infant face-to-face interaction: the
sequence of dyadic states at 3, 6, and 9 months. Dev. Psychol. 23, 68–77. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.23.1.68
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2012). “Exploring affiliation in the reception of conversational
complaint stories,” in Emotion in Interaction, eds A. Peräkylä and M.-L. Sorjonen
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 113–146.
Decety, J., and Meyer, M. (2008). From emotion resonance to empathic understanding: a social developmental neuroscience account. Dev. Psychopathol. 20,
1053–1080. doi: 10.1017/S0954579408000503
Dimberg, U. (2007). Facial reactions to facial expressions. Psychophysiology 19,
643–647. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1982.tb02516.x
Dunbar, R. (1997). Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Edelsky, C. (1981). Who’s got the floor? Lang. Soc. 10, 383–421. doi: 10.1017/
S004740450000885X
Enfield, N. (2011). “Sources of asymmetry in human interaction: enchrony, status,
knowledge and agency,” in The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, eds T.
Stivers, L. Mondada, and J. Steensig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
285–312.
Feinman, S. (1982). Social referencing in infancy. Merrill Palmer Q. J. Dev. Psychol.
28, 445–470.
Goffman, E. (1955). On face-work: an analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry 18, 213–231.
Goodwin, C., and Goodwin, M. H. (1987). Concurrent operations on talk: notes on
the interactive organisation of assessments. IPRA Papers Pragmat. 1, 1–54. doi:
10.1075/iprapip.1.1.01goo
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., and Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Curr.
Dir. Psychol. Sci. 2, 96–99. doi: 10.1111/1467-8721.ep10770953
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., and Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotion Contagion. New
York: Cambride University Press.
Heath, C. (1989). Pain talk: the expression of suffering in the medical consultation.
Soc. Psychol. Q. 52, 113–125. doi: 10.2307/2786911
Heath, C., vom Lehm, D., Cleverly, J., and Luff, P. (2012). “Revealing surprise: the
local ecology and the transposition of action,” in Emotion in Interaction, eds A.
Peräkylä and M.-L. Sorjonen (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 212–234. doi:
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730735.003.0010
Hepburn, A., and Potter, J. (2012). “Crying and crying responses,” in Emotion in
Interaction, eds A. Peräkylä and M.-L. Sorjonen (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), 194–210.
Heritage, J. (1984). “A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement,” in Structures of Social Action, eds J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 299–345.
Heritage, J. (2011). “Territories of knowledge, territories of experience: empathic
moments in interaction,” in The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, eds T.
Stivers, L. Mondada, and J. Steensig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
159–183.
Hietanen, J. K., Leppänen, J. M., Peltola, M. J., Linna-aho, K., and Ruuhiala,
H. J. (2008). Seeing direct and averted gaze activates the approach-avoidance
motivational brain systems. Neuropsychologia 46, 2423–2430. doi: 10.1016/
j.neuropsychologia.2008.02.029
Hobson, P., and Hobson, J. A. (2008). “Engaging, sharing, knowing: some lessons
from research in autism,” in The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking

eds J. Zlatev, T. P. Racine, C. Sinha, and E. Itkonen (Amsterdam: Benjamins),
67–88. doi: 10.1075/celcr.12.06hob
Iwasaki, S. (2011). “The multimodal mechanics of collaborative unit construction
in Japanese conversation,” in Embodied Interaction: Language and the Body in
the Material World, eds J. Streeck, C. Goodwin, and C. LeBaron (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 106–120.
Kaukomaa, T., Peräkylä, A., and Ruusuvuori, J. (in press). Facial expressions in
collaborative modification of emotional stance. Res. Lang. Soc. Int.
Lerner, G. (2002). “Turn-sharing: the choral co-production of talk-in-interaction,”
in The Language of Turn and Sequence, eds C. E. Ford, B. A. Fox, and S. A.
Thompson (New York: Oxford University Press), 225–256.
Leslie, K. R., Johnson-Frey, S. H., and Grafton, S. T. (2004). Functional imaging of
face and hand imitation: towards a motor theory of empathy. Neuroimage 21,
601–607. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.09.038
Locke, J. L. (1996). Why do infants begin to talk? Language as an unintended
consequence. J. Child Lang. 23, 251–268. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900008783
Locke, J. L. (2002). First communion: the emergence of vocal relationships. Soc. Dev.
10, 294–308. doi: 10.1111/1467-9507.00167
Maynard, D. W., and Freese, J. (2012). “Good news, bad news, and affect: practical
and temporal ‘emotion work’ in everyday life,” in Emotion in Interaction, eds A.
Peräkylä and M.-L. Sorjonen (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 92–112. doi:
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730735.003.0005
Meltzoff, A. N., and Brooks, R. (2001). “’Like me’ as a building block for understanding other minds: bodily acts, attention, and intention,” in Intentions and
Intentionality: Foundations of Social Science, eds B. Malle, L. J. Moses and D. A.
Baldwin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 171–191.
Meltzoff, A. N., and Moore, M. K. (1977). Imitation of facial and manual gestures
by human neonates. Science 198, 75–78. doi: 10.1126/science.198.4312.75
Peräkylä, A., and Ruusuvuori, J. (2006). “Facial expression in an assessment,” in
Video-analysis: Methodology and Methods, eds H. Knoblauch, B. Schnettler, J.
Raab, and H. G. Soeffner (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang), 127–142.
Peräkylä, A., and Sorjonen, M.-L. (eds). (2012). Emotion in Interaction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730735.001.0001
Peräkylä, A. (in press). From narcissism to face work: two views on the self in social
interaction. Amer. J. Soc.
Pillet-Shore, D. (2012). Greeting: displaying stance through prosodic recipient
design. Res. Lang. Soc. Int. 45, 375–398. doi: 10.1080/08351813.2012.724994
Rawls, A. W. (1987). The interation order sui generis: goffman’s contribution to
social theory. Soc. Theory 5, 136–149. doi: 10.2307/201935
Rochat, P. (2001). The Infant’s World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rochat, P., and Passos-Ferreira, C. (2008). “From imitation to reciprocation and
mutual recognition,” in Mirror Neurons System: The Role of Mirroring Processes
in Social Cognition, ed. J. A. Pineda (New York: Humana Press, Springer Science),
191–212.
Rochat, P., Passos-Ferreira, C., and Salem, P. (2009). “Three levels of intersubjectivity in early development,” in Enacting Intersubjectivity: Paving the Way for a
Dialogue between Cognitive Science, Social Cognition and Neuroscience, eds A.
Carassa, F. Morganti, and G. Riva (Lugano: Università della Svizzera Italiana),
173–190.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.2307/412243
Sagi, A., and Hoffman, M. L. (1976). Empathic distress in the newborn. Dev. Psychol.
12, 175–176. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.12.2.175
Schegloff, E. A. (1988). “Goffman and the analysis of conversation,” in Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, eds P. Drew and A. Wootton (Cambridge:
Polity Press), 89–135.
Schegloff, E. A. (1996). “Turn organization: one direction for inquiry into grammar
and interaction,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and
S. A. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 52–133.
Schegloff, E. A. (2006). “Interaction: the infrastructure for social institutions, the
natural ecological niche for language, and the arena in which culture is situated,”
in Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds N. J. Enfield
and S. C. Levinson (Oxford: Berg), 70–96.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511791208
Selting, M. (1994). Emphatic speech style: with special focus on the prosodic
signalling of heightened emotive involvement in conversation. J. Pragmat. 22,
375–408. doi: 10.1016/0378-2166(94)90116-3

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 450 | 181

Stevanovic and Peräkylä

Shaw, C., Hepburn, A., and Potter, J. (2013). “Having the last laugh: on postcompletion laughter particles,” in Studies of Laughter in Interaction, eds P. Glenn
and E. Holt (London: Bloomsbury), 91–106.
Spitz, R. A., and Wolf, K. M. (1946). The smiling response: a contribution to the
ontogenesis of social relations. Genet. Psychol. Monographs 34, 57–125.
Sroufe, L. A. (1996). Emotional Development: The Organization of Emotional Life
in the Early Years. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/
CBO9780511527661
Stern, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis
and Developmental Psychology. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Stern, D. N., Jaffe, J., Beebe, B., and Bennett, S. L. (1975). Vocalizing in unison and in
alternation: two modes of communication within the mother-infant dyad. Ann.
N. Y. Acad. Sci. 263, 89–100. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1975.tb41574.x
Stevanovic, M. (2015). Displays of uncertainty and proximal deontic claims: the
case of proposal sequences. J. Pragmat. 78, 84–97. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2014.
12.002
Stevanovic, M., and Frick, M. (2014). Singing in interaction. Soc. Semiotics 24,
495–513. doi: 10.1080/10350330.2014.929394
Striano, T., and Rochat, P. (1999). Developmental link between dyadic and triadic
social competence in infancy. Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 17, 551–562. doi: 10.1348/
026151099165474
Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking

Trevarthen, C. (1979). “Communication and cooperation in early infancy: a
description of primary intersubjectivity,” in Before Speech: The Beginnings of
Human Communication, ed. M. Bullowa (London: Cambridge University Press),
99–136.
Vatanen, A. (2014). Responding in Overlap: Agency, Epistemicity and Social Action
in Conversation. Academic dissertation. University of Helsinki, Department of
Finnish, Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian Studies.
Wilkinson, S., and Kitzinger C. (2006). Surprise as an interactional achievement:
reaction tokens in conversation. Soc. Psychol. Q. 69, 150–182. doi: 10.1177/
019027250606900203
Wolff, P. (1987). The Development of Behavioral States and the Expression of
Emotions in Early Infancy. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Stevanovic and Peräkylä. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s)
or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in
accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is
permitted which does not comply with these terms.

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 450 | 182

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 24 March 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00268

Turn-timing in signed conversations:
coordinating stroke-to-stroke turn
boundaries
Connie de Vos 1* , Francisco Torreira 1 and Stephen C. Levinson 1,2
1

Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2 Radboud
University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Edited by:
Gabriella Vigliocco,
University College London, UK
Reviewed by:
Wendy Sandler,
University of Haifa, Israel
Simon Garrod,
University of Glasgow, UK
*Correspondence:
Connie de Vos,
Language and Cognition Department,
Max Planck institute for
Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310,
6500AH Nijmegen, Netherlands
connie.devos@mpi.nl
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences, a section of the
journal Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 21 November 2014
Accepted: 23 February 2015
Published: 24 March 2015
Citation:
de Vos C, Torreira F and Levinson SC
(2015) Turn-timing in signed
conversations: coordinating
stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries.
Front. Psychol. 6:268.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00268

In spoken interactions, interlocutors carefully plan, and time their utterances, minimizing
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.
Keywords: turn-taking, turn-timing, visual-gestural modality, sign language, sign phonetics, conversation
analysis

Introduction
Spontaneous conversations among speakers often run smoothly with slight overlaps and gaps
between consecutive turns (Sacks et al., 1974). Comparative research has shown that speakers from
a broad range of typologically and geographically dispersed languages vary little in response latencies in question–answer sequences, with mean overall offsets at 229 ms, and language-specific
means within 250 ms on either side of this cross-language mean (Stivers et al., 2009). A general observation in studies of spoken interaction is that speakers orient toward a one-at-a-time
principle when taking turns at talk, and do so at a surprisingly fast pace across a wide range of

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 183

de Vos et al.

spoken languages. The universality of this tightly organized
behavior in spoken conversation, as well as its clear precursors in
early infancy, make a case for turn-taking constituting an important part of human communicative ethology (Levinson, 2006). A
leading question for the research reported here is to what extent
sign language users also operate the same turn-taking system as
used in spoken languages, especially with regard to turn-timing.
One of the substantial discoveries of the last 50 years is
that sign languages show all the properties of full natural languages on all relevant levels of linguistic structure, including, for instance, sublexical structure at the phonological level
(Emmorey, 2002; Meier et al., 2002; Sandler and Lillo-Martin,
2006; Channon and van der Hulst, 2011; Berent et al., 2013).
However, it has been suggested that, in conversational turntaking, signers may show greater toleration for overlap due to
the characteristics of the visual modality. In signed conversation, visual feedback does not interfere with sign-production,
in the same way that auditive feedback does when speaking
(Emmorey et al., 2009). This suggests that, if turn-taking was
basically motivated by channel limitations (the difficulty of hearing and speaking at the same time), then signed turn-timing
should be characterized by a higher proportion of overlapping
turns. Additionally, Coates and Sutton-Spence (2001) argue that
unlike speakers, signers do not attend to the one-at-a-time principle, and rather form a collaborative floor with their interlocutors,
thus having higher degrees of social tolerance for overlap.
Conversation analytic work on sign languages has been sparse,
yet early studies of signed conversations have observed some
remarkable features of signed interactions. Baker (1977) was the
first to note that unlike speakers, sign language users need to
ensure visual attention of their interlocutors before they can initiate a turn, hence the use of various types of summonses is more
pervasive in signed interaction due to the localized nature of
visual information, which requires attentional focus (McIlvenny,
1995). In addition to explicit attention-getting gestures such as
waves and taps, this may be done by repeating the initial sign of
a turn until recipiency is confirmed through eye contact. The latter strategy appears akin to recycling turn beginnings in spoken
conversation, but has the specific purpose of mobilizing recipiency (cf. Schegloff, 1987). In multi-party conversation, multiple
signers may self-select for the next turn and thus initiate signing at the same time, although such overlaps may not always be
attended to. In addition, there are many other cases of overlapping movement of participants’ articulators. As such it is important to consider, in the case of sign language, whether overlapping
signs are in fact attended to as competitive turns by speech act
participants (McIlvenny, 1995; McCleary and de Arantes Leite,
2013; Groeber and Pochon-Berger, 2014). In the current study,
we consider turns that make relevant a timely and contingent
response on behalf of the addressee, namely question and answer
sequences.
In spoken conversation, addressees sometimes initiate a
response at a possible point of completion while the initial
speaker continues his turn, thus resulting in terminal overlap (Jefferson, 1986; Schegloff, 2000). Similarly, Baker (1977)
observed the phenomenon of partial overlap at signed turn
transitions when “one interactant’s hand(s) moving toward the

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-timing in signed conversations

position where a sign will be made as the other interactant is
making a sign.” However, in considering the comparison between
spoken and signed languages, we must bear in mind that the
preparation for vocalization in spoken languages is mostly inaccessible to other participants, consisting apart from inbreaths in
early motor preparation of the vocal organs (Palo et al., 2014).
Therefore, as argued by McCleary and de Arantes Leite (2013),
these preparatory movements in sign function on a par with
pre-turn inbreaths or other pre-vocal preparation in spoken languages and thus should arguably be excluded from the analysis of
the actual exchange of turns. That is to say, it seems reasonable,
in order to compare signed, and spoken interactions on equal
grounds, to exclude the preparation for signing from timing analysis, as has been the case with the preparation for speaking in the
analysis of spoken turn-taking (McCleary and de Arantes Leite,
2013). In our analysis of turn-timing, we differentiate between
partial overlaps and possible completion overlaps by taking the
start of the initial stroke (the ‘content’ part of the manual gesture)
as the turn beginning as it most directly reflects the phonological
content of a sign.
Overlap at signed turn transitions may also result from turnfinal holds, which are typically released as soon as the relevant response has been recognized (Groeber and Pochon-Berger,
2014). Crucially, signers do not orient to these practices as
troublesome in conversation, nor do such overlaps get dealt
with using designated overlap resolution devices (cf. Schegloff,
2000; McCleary and de Arantes Leite, 2013). We thus hypothesized that in optimizing turn transitions, sign language users
focus on the phonological content of signs as represented by
the stroke, and disregard early preparatory movements, and the
intentional holding of signs for response, as well as post-utterance
retraction. In other words, the end of the final stroke appears
to most directly parallel the transition relevance place (TRP)
at which a contingent response on behalf of the interlocutor
becomes relevant (Sacks et al., 1974).
If turn-taking lies deep in our communicational instincts as
has been suggested (Levinson, 2006), then it may be expected
to follow broadly similar lines regardless of language modality.
We therefore test the prediction that in signed conversations,
interlocutors attend to stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries. If this
were the case, turn-timing in signed interactions as calculated
by stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries should be within the same
cross-linguistic range as has previously been reported for spoken
languages.
To address this question we analyze turn-timing in 190
question–answer sequences captured from spontaneous conversations of Sign Language of the Netherlands Nederlandse
Gebarentaal (NGT). Questions–answer sequences provide a particularly well-suited conversational context in which to investigate turn-timing, as questions make due a conditionally relevant
and timely response (cf. Stivers et al., 2009). The signs for each
question–answer sequence were coded and checked by native
signers for onset, lexical content, and holds and decays using the
coding system originally devised for both co-speech gesture and
sign language by Kita et al. (1998).
The paper is structured as follows. Section “Materials and
Methods” provides details on our data collection as well as

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 184

de Vos et al.

the annotation scheme. Section “Results” presents a statistical
comparison of turn-timing in the NGT sample to the spoken
languages as reported by Stivers et al. (2009). Finally, section
“Discussion” discusses the methodological implications of our
work.

Materials and Methods
The NGT Interactive Corpus
This study exploits the NGT Interactive corpus, which consists
of spontaneous conversations of native NGT signers in informal
settings, which have been collected, and analyzed by Merel van
Zuilen, Stephen C. Levinson and Connie de Vos (Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics), and Onno Crasborn (Radboud
University) from early 2011 onward. All data and analyses have
been ethically approved by the Radboud University Ethical committee under the research program De structuur en ontwikkeling
van conversaties in gebarentaal (De Vos and Levinson; project
code ECG2012-1304-098).
The recording sessions of the NGT Interactive corpus took
place in participants’ homes, at various deaf clubs, as well as
a small restaurant, between participants who were long-term
acquaintances and friends. These signers were also very familiar with the research assistant who recorded them, and who
is a deaf native signer of NGT herself. The data therefore has
the character of natural conversation. All conversations were
recorded using two HD cameras from different camera angles.
The data on which the present study is based features 16 signers
(seven females) in one triadic and six dyadic interactions totaling 11 h and 2 min of raw video data. In one of the dyadic
interactions, a third person occasionally joined the conversation, but did not participate in any of the question–answer
sequences in our analysis. For this reason, this recording is treated
as a dyadic interaction. All but one of the signers included in
this study had acquired NGT early in life, before the age of
ten and all three variants of NGT – Northern, Western, and
Southern – are represented in the sample. Conversation topics
ranged, unprompted by the investigators, from a work meeting
regarding the write-up of a professional paper, home improvement activities, the history of the deaf club, and interpersonal
relations.
The video recordings were compressed into MPEG2 format
at 1920 × 1080 resolution and 25 fps. The relevant sections
were then translated into written Dutch and annotated further
using ELAN video annotation software (Crasborn and Sloetjes,
2008). As is customary in sign language research, each sign was
glossed using a designated ID-gloss stemming from the Corpus
NGT (Crasborn and de Meijer, 2012), and supplemented with
novel ID-glosses whenever necessary. Non-manual signals, such
as head and body movements, eyebrow movement, and eyegaze
were coded in multiple independent tiers.

Identification of Question–Answer
Sequences
In order to ensure a diverse sample of question–answer
sequences, we selected 30 min segments from each video file that

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-timing in signed conversations

were dense in turn transitions. In identifying these sequences,
we adopted the selection criteria which were originally developed as part of the MPI Coding Scheme for Question–Response
Sequences in Conversation at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
(Enfield et al., 2003) and form the basis of Stivers et al. (2009).
NGT polar questions are canonically marked out by raised eyebrows and a head tilt, while content questions are accompanied
by a frown (Coerts, 1992). It is also syntactically possible for a
content question to be formed in the absence of a wh-sign, as long
as the signer uses furrowed brows. More recent work on NGT has
also indicated that the brow movements associated with different
question types may also be affected by paralinguistic factors, such
as affect, and that these non-manual signals are therefore not a
reliable cue to syntactic sentence type (De Vos et al., 2009). For
these reasons, all questions in our sample were selected based
on functional criteria, regardless of whether they made use of
an interrogative sentence type. Specifically, we included all turns
that evoked an informative answer on behalf of the addressee.
Questions that were offered in reported speech, requests for physical actions, rhetorical questions, and two or more questions that
were subsequently delivered in a single turn were excluded from
the analysis.
Importantly, sign languages are essentially multi-modal in
nature in the sense that signers do not only use their hands but
also their facial expressions and body postures to express meaning at the linguistic and paralinguistic level. The non-manual
components are sometimes considered as the equivalent of intonation or prosody in sign (see for instance van der Kooij et al.,
2006; De Vos et al., 2009 on NGT). In the interactions we studied, a facial expression functioned on occasion as a turn on its
own, for example when the combined use of a frown with a nose
wrinkle and eyegaze at the addressee was taken as an open class
repair initiator (similar to spoken huh?). Similarly, in some contexts, polar questions evoked a minimal response such as a head
nod (yes) or a side-to-side headshake (no). Stivers et al. (2009)
report that in spoken interactions, such visible behaviors result in
faster turn transition times compared to vocal-only responses in
the majority of languages in their sample. Similarly, non-manual
signals in sign languages may often times persist beyond question
boundaries and it is unclear at present to what extent each signal
should be regarded as part of the turn at talk (De Vos et al., 2009;
McCleary and de Arantes Leite, 2013). Our current analyses are
therefore focused on the propositional content of the utterance as
expressed by the movements of the hands. These manual movements are phonologically specified as part of the language and
are most comparable to spoken words as such. Consequently, we
have excluded 24 items of the original data set in which either the
question or its response were solely expressed non-manually. The
remaining set of functional questions were further categorized
into polar questions and content questions resulting in a total
data set of 190 questions, of which were 104 polar questions and
86 content questions. Overall, polar questions were thus slightly
more common than content questions, as is the case in nine
out of the 10 spoken language samples analyzed by Stivers et al.
(2009:10588). All of the 16 signers that contributed to the corpus
are represented in the sample as both questioner and answerer.
The triadic conversation included 42 question answer sequences,

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 185

de Vos et al.

whereas the dyadic conversations included 44, 28, 28, 23, 16, and
9 question–answer sequences, respectively.

Movement Phase Coding
Our analysis of turn-timing is based on the coding of the various
movement phases that make up a sign. Specifically, we adopted
the movement phase coding developed for Sign Language of the
Netherlands and co-speech gesture (Kita et al., 1998). This coding
system distinguishes four movement phases for each sign: preparation, stroke, hold, and retraction. These movement phases are
illustrated in Figures 1A–D. This figure displays all four movement phases in relation to the Dutch sign for ‘brother,’ which is
produced by touching the contra-lateral upper arm twice with
the middle and index fingers extended. During the preparation
phase the hands move into position and the lexically-specified
hand shape is selected (Figure 1A). The stroke most directly represents the phonological form of a sign and includes the internal
movement of a sign, in this case touching the contra-lateral upper
arm (Figure 1B). Subsequently to the stroke, a signer might hold
a sign during interaction, for example to mobilize a response in
their interlocutor (Figure 1C). Finally, the sign may be retracted
and the hands move into resting position (Figure 1D).
Importantly, each sign is minimally associated with a single stroke, but the other three movement phases do not always
occur (Kita et al., 1998). This analysis is compatible with the
view that signs tend to be monosyllabic, consisting typically
of a single phase (a path movement and/or a single handinternal movement) or a repetition of a path movement or handinternal movement (cf. Coulter, 1982; Brentari, 1998; Sandler,
1999; van der Kooij and Crasborn, 2008). The beginning and end
points of each stroke were identified on the basis of the initial and final frame in which the lexically-specified hand shapes
for the relevant sign were fully formed. Furthermore, for signs
that include a phonologically specified internal movement, the
stroke may be lengthened by a repetition of this internal movement, rather than transitioning into an utterance-final hold (cf.
Perlmutter, 1992; Nespor and Sandler, 1999; Stewart, 2014). We
have also observed this phenomenon our NGT data set, and in

Turn-timing in signed conversations

such cases only the initial inherent movement, which is lexicallyspecified, was included into the stroke.
For a subset of items (59 questions) a second coder, who is
also a native signer of Sign Language of the Netherlands, applied
the same Gesture Phase coding system. Subsequently, any items
that showed discrepancies of more than two video frames were
discussed, and adjusted when necessary. In a few cases these differences were based in a distinct phonological analysis of the signs
that were being used and these two interpretations could not be
reconciled. After these discussion sessions the overall correlations
between these two coders was 0.9 for the sign-naive boundary
measures and 0.98 for the stroke-to-stroke boundary measures.

Phonetic Measures
In our study we report on three phonetic measures of turn transition times based on the coding of gesture phases. The first
measure looks at sign-naive turn-boundaries and includes all
manual actions, that is, all movement phases that make up a
signer’s utterance. The second measure looks at stroke-to-stroke
turn boundaries, which run from the start of the initial stroke of
a turn till the end of the turn-final stroke. For each signer, gestural movement phases from both hands were taken into account.
The third and final measure calculates the offset of the addressee’s
preparation phase with respect to the end of the question’s final
stroke, and is called signed utterance launch. Figure 2 illustrates each of the reported phonetic measures schematically. In
section “Results,” each of these phonetic measures of signed turntiming are compared to findings from the spoken turn-timing in
cross-linguistic study presented by Stivers et al. (2009).
Figure 3 displays an excerpt from the corpus to exemplify the
three phonetic measures. This question–answer sequence stems
from a conversation between two males who are close friends
living in the North of the Netherlands. They are discussing
remodeling activities while enjoying lunch on a roof top terrace.
Directly preceding the excerpt, the signer to the viewer’s right
(R) indicates his misunderstanding using a minimal repair initiator by furrowing his brows and leaning forward similar to a
spoken ‘huh?’ (cf. Dingemanse et al., 2013). As explained above,

FIGURE 1 | The four gestural movement phases of the Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT) sign BROER ‘brother’: (A) preparation, (B) stroke, (C) hold,
and (D) retraction.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 186

de Vos et al.

Turn-timing in signed conversations

FIGURE 2 | Schematic representation of the three different phonetic measures reported in this study: sign-naive turn-boundaries, stroke-to-stroke
turn boundaries, and launching sentence articulation.

FIGURE 3 | Example of a turn transition from the NGT Interactive corpus: (A) snapshot of a turn transition; (B) scaled representation of the gestural
movement phases during the turn transition.

when questions were formed without manual movements these
were not included into the current analysis. In this example, each
signer uses only a single hand to produce the relevant signs. At
the start of the excerpt, the signer on the left (L) asks how far
along signer R has progressed regarding the renovation of a particular venue. His question ends in the lexical sign HERE (Dutch:

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

hier), which is formed by a downward index finger point, and
co-produced with the Dutch mouth movement nu ‘now.’ At the
end of his question, the sign HERE is immediately retracted over
430 ms without a sentence-final hold, presumably because the
addressee (signer R) has already raised his hand to produce an
appropriate response. Signer R’s answer starts off with the sign

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 187

de Vos et al.

NOW, and he initiates the preparation of this initial sign before
signer L has initiated the start of the preparation of his final
sign. As a result, both signers overlap by 690 ms according to
the sign-naive turn boundary measure and the launch of R’s sentence articulation has a negative value of −260 ms. According to
the stroke-to-stroke measurement, however, there is a slight gap
of 30 ms between both turns. This turn transition is detailed in
(Figure 3A) which displays snapshots from both camera angels of
the final frame of Signer L’s turn-final stroke. On the left-hand side
there is a clear view of signer L and the end state of the sign HERE.
The camera view on the right-hand side clearly shows signer R
who is in the middle of the preparation phase of his turn-initial
NOW; the white arrow indicates the trajectory of its stroke. The
exact timing of this turn transition is illustrated by a scaled representation of the gestural movements of this turn transition in
Figure 3B.

Results
The Timing of Question–Answer Sequences
To test whether signers optimize turn-taking on the basis of
stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries, we compared turn transition
times in NGT with turn transition times in spoken question–
answer sequences in ten languages as reported in Stivers et al.
(2009). In what follows, we adopt the Floor Transfer Offset
(FTO) representation used in De Ruiter et al. (2006), in which
gaps are measured in positive milliseconds, overlaps in negative
milliseconds. Figure 4A shows a density plot of turn transition
offset for the overall data set according to the sign-naive turn
boundary measure. The sign-naive boundary measure calculates
turn-timing by including all gestural movement phases of the
hands. According to this phonetic measure, the average offset of
answers to questions was −812 ms, the median was −607 ms,
and the mode (estimated with the density() function in R
set to default parameters; R Core Team, 2014, and corresponding to the highest value in the density plot in Figure 4A) was
−361 ms. These negative values of central tendency indicate that
addressees generally start signing well before the question has

Turn-timing in signed conversations

fully ended. The average value of −687 ms was 6.18 SDs below
the cross-linguistic average turn transition time as estimated from
Stivers et al. (2009); m = 229 ms, SD = 168 ms). Assuming that
average turn transition times across spoken languages are normally distributed, and using the data reported in Stivers et al.
(2009) to estimate the parameters of this distribution, the probability of observing such a value in this distribution or lower
is extremely low (p < 0.0001). The sign-naive turn boundary
measure thus suggests that the timing of responses to questions
in the visual modality deviates substantially from oral-auditory
turn-taking in that it exhibits both more and more extended
overlap.
Secondly, we calculated turn-timing following the stroke-tostroke boundary measure, which is based on the hypothesis that
signers observe stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries. This phonetic
measure calculates the offset of the answerer’s initial stroke with
respect to the end of the final stroke of the questioner. Figure 4B
shows a density plot of the stroke-to-stroke turn boundary measure. According to this measure, turn transition times in NGT
now exhibit a positive gap, with an average of 307 ms, a median
of 269 ms, and an estimated mode of 227 ms. The average value
of 307 ms was only 0.46 SD above the cross-linguistic average turn transition time as estimated from Stivers et al. (2009).
Assuming that the distribution of average turn transition times
across spoken languages is normal, and using the numbers in
Stivers et al. (2009), the probability of observing a value of 372 ms
or higher is well above the commonly used alpha level of 2.5% for
a two-tailed test (p = 0.32). When we exclude utterance-initial
preparatory movements, and utterance-final holds and decays,
turn-timing in signed interaction thus falls within range of oralauditory turn-taking as reported by Stivers et al. (2009). This is
illustrated in Figure 5, which shows the average turn transition
times in Stivers et al. (2009) plus our two NGT measures.

The Proportion of Overlapping and Delayed
Turn Transitions
Another way of looking at signed versus spoken turn-timing is
by comparing the distributions of overlapping and delayed turn

FIGURE 4 | Density plots of answer latency according to the sign-naive (A) and stroke-to-stroke (B) turn boundary measures.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 188

de Vos et al.

Turn-timing in signed conversations

FIGURE 5 | Average turn transition times in 10 spoken languages (in dark gray, from Stivers et al., 2009) and in NGT (in light gray).

transitions. Heldner (2011) previously showed that, with regard
to spoken Swedish the threshold for noticeable gaps and overlaps
lies at FTOs of 120 ms and −120 ms, respectively. At the moment,
it is unknown whether this threshold would generalize to other
spoken languages, e.g., to those that have relatively fast or slow
turn transition time on average, such as Japanese or Danish, or
indeed to sign language. Notwithstanding this caveat, for the sake
of comparability, we here consider any turn transition offsets that
exceed 120 ms as turns with a noticeable gap, and any turn transition offsets that are −120 ms or less as overlapping in order to

compare the distributions of the NGT sample to the Stivers et al.
(2009) study.
Figure 6 presents an overview of the percentages of overlapping answers to questions, including the data reported in
this study. As estimated by Heldner (2011) based on data
from Stivers et al. (2009), the proportion of overlapping turn
transitions in question–answer sequences, may range from 13.5%
as reported of Lao to 40.0% as reported for spoken Japanese, with
a mean of 26.01% and SD of 8.2%. When considering stroketo-stroke boundaries, 29.8% of responses to questions come in

FIGURE 6 | Percentage of turn transitions overlapping 120 ms or more for 10 spoken languages (in dark gray) and in NGT (in light gray). Non-NGT data
based on Table II in Heldner (2011:519).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 189

de Vos et al.

overlap, which is within the cross-linguistic range. Assuming that
the distribution of percentages of overlaps in the cross-linguistic
sample is normally distributed, and using the data in Stivers et al.
(2009) to estimate its parameters, the probability of observing this
value or higher in such distribution is well above the commonly
used alpha level of 5% (p = 0.28). According to the sign-naive
measure, however, 82.2% of answers overlap with the respective
question. This percentage clearly falls outside the cross-linguistic
range for spoken languages. The probability of observing this
value or a higher value in the cross-linguistic distribution is
extremely low (p < 0.00001).
Figure 7 presents an overview of the percentages of transitions
between answers and questions involving a gap of more than
120 ms, including the data reported in this study. As estimated
by Heldner (2011) based on Stivers et al. (2009), the proportion
of delayed turn transitions in question–answer sequences may
range from 41.1% as reported of Japanese to 73.0% as reported
for spoken Lao. When considering stroke-to-stroke boundaries
in the sign language data, 58.3% of responses to questions had
a gap of 120 ms or more; this is within the cross-linguistic
expectations. Assuming that the distribution of percentages of
overlaps in the cross-linguistic sample is normally distributed,
the probability of observing a value of 58.3% or lower is well
above 5% (p = 0.54). According to the sign-naive measure,
however, only 17.8% of answers overlap with the respective question, which would be three times less than the spoken language
which allows for the smallest number of delays in question–
answer sequences. The probability of observing this value or a
lower value in the cross-linguistic distribution is much lower
(p < 0.00001).

Launching Utterance Articulation in Sign
Unlike spoken languages, signed languages offer us the unique
opportunity to examine turn preparation using non-invasive

Turn-timing in signed conversations

methods. In our data, the preparatory phase of utterances had an
average duration of 474 ms, a median of 280 ms, and an estimated
mode of 255 ms. We computed a third turn transition timing
measure corresponding to the latency between the end of the
final stroke of the question and the onset of the initial preparatory movements of answer articulation. Relative to the end of
the final stroke of the question, response articulation in our data
starts with an average latency of −86 ms, a median latency of
−78 ms and a modal latency of −53 ms. The timing of preparatory movements in sign is thus slightly earlier than the initiation
of pre-utterance inbreaths in answers to questions in spoken
Dutch (15 ms; Torreira et al., 2015). We return to this point in
the discussion section. Table 1 summarizes all main results from
the present corpus analysis.

Turn-Timing in Dyadic vs. Triadic
Interactions
As explained in Section “The NGT Interactive Corpus,” one
of the recordings in our corpus consisted of a triadic interaction, the other six involving dyadic conversations. Because
turn-timing might differ between triadic and dyadic interactions
(e.g., due to increased competition for the floor), we examined
each of the timing measures presented in the previous subsections (i.e., sign-naive turn boundaries, stroke-to-stroke turn
boundaries, and the launching of utterance articulation) as a
function of the number of participants in the interaction. We
fitted a series of mixed-effects regression models with each of
the timing measures as the response, number of participants
(dyadic vs. triadic) as a fixed factor, and conversation as a random factor. None of the three models yielded a statistical effect
for the fixed factor number of participants (p > 0.1 in all
three cases), indicating that the triadic conversation was not significantly different from the dyadic conversations in terms of
turn-timing.

FIGURE 7 | Percentage of turn transitions with a gap of more than 120 ms for 10 spoken languages (in dark gray) and in NGT (in light gray). Non-NGT
data based on Table II in Heldner (2011:519).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 190

de Vos et al.

Turn-timing in signed conversations

TABLE 1 | Summary of main results: mean, median, and mode for each
phonetic measure of turn-boundaries (in milliseconds).
Mean
Sign-naive turn boundaries
Stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries
Launching utterance articulation

Median

−812

−607

307

269

−86

−78

Mode
−361
227
−53

Discussion
This study uses a corpus analysis of Sign Language of the
Netherlands (NGT) in order to address the question as to what
degree turn-timing in signed conversation differs from turntiming in spoken conversation. The present study has focused on
responses to questions, as questions require a timely and contingently relevant response, and could therefore serve as a baseline
measure as to how much overlap or gap might be allowed in
a given language. Moreover, the timing of responses to questions has been documented in a wide range of spoken languages
(Stivers et al., 2009), thus allowing for a controlled comparison to
turn-timing across modalities. On the basis of the corpus analysis of spontaneous interactions in NGT, we find that signed
conversation exhibits a significantly greater amount of overlap
than spoken conversation when we consider all hand action
phases as being part of a turn, i.e., preparation, stroke, hold and
retraction movements (cf. Kita et al., 1998). Interestingly, however, when we only consider the lexically-specified movement of
the hands, i.e., the strokes, turn transition times in signed conversation are clearly within the cross-linguistic range reported for
spoken languages, with an estimated mode of 227 ms, and with
comparable amounts of gaps and overlaps. We have also found
that the timing of the beginning of the preparation phase of the
response relative to the end of the last stroke of the question is
slightly earlier in signed conversation than that of pre-utterance
inbreaths in spoken Dutch conversation, with modes of −53 ms
vs. 15 ms.
As noted in the introduction, it has previously been claimed
that signed conversation exhibits more overlap than spoken
conversation. Coates and Sutton-Spence (2001), for instance,
have argued that signers, unlike speakers, may not adhere to
a one-at-a-time principle in turn-taking. Rather, they suggest
that sign language users are oriented toward a collaborative
floor in which more overlap is permitted and socially valued.
McCleary and de Arantes Leite (2013) criticized this study for
not specifying what types of turns-at-talk may legitimately be
used in overlap, and for not providing precise temporal values regarding the use of the various articulators. The present
study has shown that, at least in responses to questions, turntiming in signed conversation looks remarkably similar to that
of spoken conversation if we define the delineation of turns on
the basis of their stroke phases only (i.e., excluding preparatory,
retraction, and hold phases). The decision to consider stroke
phases alone is not an arbitrary one, since strokes encode the
phonological content of an utterance more directly than other
hand movements. In making a comparison between spoken and
signed languages, it is therefore plausible that preparatory and

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

retraction movements in signed conversation are best seen as
parallel to the pre-beginnings and post-completion elements
of spoken turns (cf. Schegloff, 1987), and that TRPs are best
approximated by the end of the last stroke. Experimental and
qualitative research should address these issues combining the
descriptive rigor of Conversation Analysis with perception experiments.
We have also seen that, using the stroke-to-stroke measures,
the proportions of turn transitions with noticeable gaps and
overlaps in NGT is within the same range as spoken languages
according to the stroke-to-stroke boundary measure. These comparisons were carried out on the assumption that the threshold for noticeable gaps and overlaps lies at FTOs of 120 ms
and −120 ms, respectively (cf. Heldner, 2011, based on data
from Stivers et al., 2009). At present, however, it is unclear as to
whether sign languages users are as sensitive to gaps or overlaps
as speakers are. These questions could be addressed, for instance,
by manipulating turn transition times in pre-recorded signed
conversations.
In sign, the articulators are large and heavy, and reaching
the articulatory targets of hand strokes from an inactive state
will require more time than a vocal articulatory gesture. For
this reason, the timing of preparatory hand movements preceding signed turns-at-talk may provide a crucial insight into the
time course of signed utterance planning. In our question–answer
sequences, we have observed that initial preparatory hand movements of responses are typically launched during the second half
of the last stroke of the question, and that the preparatory phase
typically ends a couple of 100 ms after the last stroke of the
question. On a par with the findings of Torreira et al. (2015)
for the timing of pre-utterance inbreaths in spoken conversation, our findings suggest that signers probably attend to final
cues to turn-closure when launching their own articulation. If
we allow for a reaction time of 200 ms (Fry, 1975), it is plausible that, in the typical case, responders initiate articulation in
response to turn-final cues such as final lengthening, which, in
sign language, can be manifested as an elongation, repetition, and
deceleration of hand movement during the final part of the utterance (cf. Perlmutter, 1992; Nespor and Sandler, 1999; Stewart,
2014). While early cues (e.g., eyebrow movement) in the question may allow for planning the content of the response, local
cues close to end of the final stroke (e.g., final lengthening) may
provide a general go-ahead signal. The result of this process is a
short stroke-to-stroke gap similar to the silent short gaps typically
found in spoken question–answer sequences (cf. Stivers et al.,
2009), and an overlap interval involving holds, retraction, and
preparation phases at turn edges. Figure 8 shows a schematic representation of typical time courses in a signed question–answer
sequence based on modal values in our data (Figure 8A), and, for
the sake of comparison, and as reported by Torreira et al. (2015)
for question–answer sequences in spoken Dutch , in a spoken
question–answer sequence in which the answer was produced
without a preparatory inbreath (Figure 8B), and in a sequence in
which a preparatory inbreath was produced (Figure 8C). Notice
that, in spoken answers too, in line with our findings for sign
language, the typical onset of the physical response, in the form
of a preparatory inbreath, or of speech proper in answers not

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 191

de Vos et al.

Turn-timing in signed conversations

FIGURE 8 | Schematic illustration of typical time courses of: (A) a question–answer sequence in Sign Language of the Netherlands; and a
question-answer sequence in spoken Dutch without (B) and with (C) a pre-utterance inbreath (based on Torreira et al., 2015).

preceded by an inbreath, typically starts briefly after the end of
the question.
The time course of turn production critically depends on the
perception and comprehension of the preceding turn (Levinson,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

2013). Recent work suggests that sign-perceivers use early
preparatory movements to predict the content of an upcoming sign, resulting in relatively early N400 effects in online
signed sentence comprehension (Hosemann et al., 2013). This

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 192

de Vos et al.

Turn-timing in signed conversations

phenomenon appears to be afforded by the fact that sign languages exhibit a phonological structure already partly visible in
the preparatory movements, thus enabling an early incremental
and predictive processing of signs. While pre-utterance inbreaths
may indicate the preparation for onset of a spoken turn, preutterance signals in spoken language (e.g., lip position) may only
offer co-articulatory information about the first segment of the
lexical content of an upcoming utterance. It is true that speakers
may thus use bodily visible behaviors to enable smooth turn transitions (Mondada, 2007; Ford et al., 2012; Oloff, 2013), but it is
unclear at present how routinely these precede vocalization.
A related issue concerns the types of non-manual signals that might enable the accurate projection of TRPs
by sign-perceivers. Reaction time experiments are currently
being run to establish sign-perceivers’ sensitivity to TRPs as
defined by stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries (Casillas et al.,
submitted). That study also aims to identify the visual information signers rely on to determine utterance boundaries
online, on the basis of linguistic annotations of the visible cues in this additional data set. On a par with previous work on spoken languages (Ford and Thompson, 1996;
Local and Walker, 2012; Torreira et al., 2015), we hypothesize
that in addition to lexical content and syntax (De Ruiter et al.,
2006; Magyari and De Ruiter, 2012), phonetic and prosodic
markers such as signing speed or height (Wilbur, 2009;
Russell et al., 2011), as well as visual intonation on the
face may play a role (Reilly et al., 1990; Nespor and Sandler,
1999; Fenlon et al., 2007; Dachkovsky and Sandler, 2009;
Dachkovsky et al., 2013) in the online prediction of stroke-tostroke turn boundaries.
This paper has centered on question–answer sequences within
a relatively limited data set. Our findings are in accordance
with the hypothesis that there may be a single turn-taking system underlying both signed and spoken interactions (Levinson,
2013). If this prediction is borne out by further research, it
will extend the discovery that sign languages share all the core
features of human language including the domain of communicative turn-taking. Our findings are also consistent with the
view that the turn-taking system may be a core part of human
communicative ethology, the foundation to language itself. If
so, we would expect turn-timing in deaf communities to vary
within the range of differences we find across spoken language
communities. Of particular interest in this regard are sign languages which have emerged within recent generations such as
home sign systems (Goldin-Meadow, 2003), signed contact pidgins (Byun et al., 2014), emerging sign languages (Meir et al.,

2010) and rural signing varieties (Zeshan and De Vos, 2012;
De Vos and Pfau, 2015). Even though these signing communities
have limited time depths, they may follow the same turn-taking
principles as other spoken and signed languages. At any rate,
we believe that the delineation of turns on the basis of stroketo-stroke turn boundaries offers a critical tool in the analysis of
turn-timing in sign. Preliminary investigations indeed indicate
that such an analysis of turn-timing can be instructive to differentiate various types of sequences of consecutive turns to repair
misunderstanding in the interactions of signers who do not know
a common sign language (Byun et al., 2014; Dingemanse et al.,
2014).
In sum, the observed patterns in signed turn-timing in
NGT are within the range observed for spoken languages
in terms of response latency to questions once we exclude
preparatory movements from turn beginnings and retraction
phases from turn ends. Moreover, unlike previously argued by
Coates and Sutton-Spence (2001), there is now both qualitative
(McIlvenny, 1995; Mesch, 2001; McCleary and de Arantes Leite,
2013; Groeber and Pochon-Berger, 2014) and quantitative evidence that sign language users orient to a one-at-a-time principle
in taking turns. All in all, our study is consistent with the view
that, despite the potential differences between the visual and
acoustic language modalities, spoken and signed turn-taking may
share more features than has previously been suggested. Further
research should center on the question as to what extent the psycholinguistic processes and time course of turn-perception and
production in sign versus speech might display similarities as well
as differences due to the affordances of each natural language
modality.

References

Byun, K.-S., Bradford, A., Levinson, S. C., Zeshan, U., and De Vos, C. (2014). Repair
sequences in cross-signing: the relationship between try markers and fast track
repair sequences. Talk presented at the International Society for Gesture Studies
(ISGS 2014), San Diego.
Channon, R., and van der Hulst, H. (eds). (2011). Formational Units in Sign
Languages. Berlin: de Gruyter and Ishara Press.
Coates, J., and Sutton-Spence, R. (2001). Turn-taking in Deaf conversation.
J. Sociolinguistics 5, 507–529. doi: 10.1111/1467-9481.00162
Coerts, J. (1992). Nonmanual Grammatical Markers. An Analysis of Interrogatives,
Negations and Topicalisations in Sign Language of the Netherlands. Netherlands:
University of Amsterdam.

Baker, C. (1977). “Regulators and turn-taking in American Sign Language
discourse,” in On The Other Hand: New Perspectives on American
Sign Language, ed. L. A. Friedman (New York: Academic Press),
215–236.
Berent, I., Dupuis, A., and Brentari, D. (2013). Amodal aspects of
linguistic design. PLoS ONE 8:e60617. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.
0060617
Brentari, D. (1998). A Prosodic Model of Sign Language Phonology. London: MIT
Press.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Acknowledgments
This publication was supported by the Max Planck Gesellschaft
as well as the ERC Advanced Grant 269484 INTERACT, awarded
to SCL. We would like to thank all signers who contributed to
the NGT Interactive Corpus as well as Merel van Zuilen, Johan
Ros, and Ellen Nauta who coded the data set, and Mart Lubbers,
for his assistance with the processing of the data. We also thank
Ellen Nauta for modeling in Figure 1, Sean Roberts for comments
on the quantitative analysis of the data, and the members of the
Language and Cognition Department, especially Elma Hilbrink,
Marisa Casillas, and Kobin Kendrick as well as Onno Crasborn
and Inge Zwitserlood for comments to previous drafts of this
paper.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 193

de Vos et al.

Coulter, G. (1982). On the nature if ASL as a monosyllabic language. Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America,
San Diego, CA.
Crasborn, O., and de Meijer, A. (2012). “From corpus to lexicon: the creation of
ID-glosses for the corpus NGT,” in Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on the
Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus
and Lexicon, Istanbul, Turkey.
Crasborn, O., and Sloetjes, H. (2008). “Enhanced ELAN functionality for sign language corpora,” in Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the Representation and
Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language
Corpora, Paris.
Dachkovsky, S., and Sandler, W. (2009). Visual intonation in the prosody of a sign
language. Lang. Speech 52, 287–314. doi: 10.1177/0023830909103175
Dachkovsky, S., Healy, C., and Sandler, W. (2013). Visual intonation in two sign
languages. Phonology 30, 211–252. doi: 10.1017/S0952675713000122
De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
De Vos, C., and Pfau, R. (2015). Sign language typology: the contribution of rural
sign languages. Ann. Rev. Linguist. 1, 265–288. doi: 10.1146/annurev-linguist030514-124958
De Vos, C., van der Kooij, E., and Crasborn, O. (2009). Mixed signals: combining linguistic and affective functions of eyebrows in questions in sign
language of the Netherlands. Lang. Speech 52, 315–339. doi: 10.1177/002383090
9103177
Dingemanse, M., Blythe, J., and Dirksmeyer, T. (2014). Formats for other-initiation
of repair across languages: an exercise in pragmatic typology. Stud. Lang. 38,
5–43. doi: 10.1075/sl.38.1.01din
Dingemanse, M., Torreira, F., and Enfield, N. J. (2013). Is Huh? A universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items. PLoS ONE 8:e78273. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.
0078273
Draper, M. H., Ladefoged, P., and Whitteridge, D. (1960). Expiratory pressures and
air flow during speech. Br. Med. J. 1837–1843.
Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights From Sign
Language Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.
Emmorey, K., Bosworth, R., and Kraljic, T. (2009). Visual feedback and
self-monitoring of sign language. J. Mem. Lang. 61, 398–411. doi:
10.1016/j.jml.2009.06.001
Enfield, N. J., de Ruiter, J. P., Levinson, S. C., and Stivers, T. (2003). “Multimodal
interaction in your field site: a preliminary investigation,” in Field Research
Manual 2003, Part I: Multimodal Interaction, Space, Event Representation,
ed. N. J. Enfield (Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics),
10–16.
Fenlon, J., Denmark, T., Campbell, R., and Woll, B. (2007). Seeing sentence
boundaries. Sign Lang. Linguist. 10, 177–200. doi: 10.1075/sll.10.2.06fen
Ford, C. E., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). Interactional units in conversation: syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns. Stud.
Interact. Sociolinguist. 13, 134–184.
Ford, C. E., Thompson, S. A., and Drake, V. (2012). Bodily-visual practices and turn continuation. Discourse Process. 49, 192–212. doi:
10.1080/0163853X.2012.654761
Fry, D. B. (1975). Simple reaction-times to speech and non-speech stimuli. Cortex
11, 355–360. doi: 10.1016/S0010-9452(75)80027-X
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). The Resilience of Language: What Gesture Creation in
Deaf Children Can Tell us About How all Children Learn Language. New York:
Psychology Press.
Groeber, S., and Pochon-Berger, E. (2014). Turns and turn-taking in sign language interaction: the role of frozen signs. J. Pragmat. 65, 121–136. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2013.08.012
Heldner, M. (2011). Detection thresholds for gaps, overlaps, and no-gap-nooverlaps. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 43, 508–513. doi: 10.1121/1.3598457
Hosemann, J., Herrmann, A., Steinbach, M., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., and
Schlesewsky, M. (2013). Lexical prediction via forward models: N400 evidence from German sign language. Neuropsychologia 51, 2224–2237. doi:
10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.07.013
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on ‘latency’ in overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.
doi: 10.1007/BF00148125

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-timing in signed conversations

Kita, S., Van Gijn, I., and van der Hulst, H. (1998). “Movement phases in
signs and co-speech gestures, and their transcription by human coders,”
in Gesture and Sign Language in Human-Computer Interaction, eds I.
Wachsmuth and M. Fröhlich (Berlin: Springer), 23–35. doi: 10.1007/
BFb0052986
Levinson, S. C. (2006). “On the human interaction engine,” in Roots of Human
Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds N. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson
(Oxford: Berg), 39–69.
Levinson, S. C. (2013). “Action formation and ascription,” in The Handbook
of Conversation Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell), 103–130.
Local, J., and Walker, G. (2012). How phonetic features project more
talk. J. Int. Phonet. Assoc. 42, 255–280. doi: 10.1017/S0025100312
000187
Magyari, L., and De Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on
anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.
00376
McCleary, L. E., and de Arantes Leite, T. (2013). Turn-taking in Brazilian
sign language: evidence from overlap. J. Int. Res. Commun. Disord. 4,
123–154.
McIlvenny, P. (1995). “Seeing conversations: analyzing sign language talk,” in
Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organization of Talk and Embodied
Activities, eds P. ten Have and G. Psathas (Washington, DC: International
Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversations Analysis & University Press
of America), 129–150.
Meier, R., Cormier, K., and Quinto-Pozos, D. (eds). (2002). Modality and Structure
in Signed and Spoken Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:
10.1017/CBO9780511486777
Meir, I., Sandler, W., Padden, C., and Aronoff, M. (2010). “Emerging Sign
Languages,” in Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education,
Vol. 2, eds M. Marschark and P. Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
267–280.
Mesch, J. (2001). Tactile Swedish Sign Language – Turn Taking and
Questions in Signed Conversations of Deaf-Blind People. Hamburg: Signum
Verlag.
Mondada, L. (2007). Multimodal resources for turn-taking: pointing and the
emergence of possible next speakers. Discourse Stud. 9, 194–225. doi:
10.1177/1461445607075346
Nespor, M., and Sandler, W. (1999). Prosody in Israeli sign language. Lang. Speech
42, 143–176. doi: 10.1177/00238309990420020201
Oloff, F. (2013). Embodied withdrawal after overlap resolution. J. Pragmat. 46,
139–156. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2012.07.005
Palo, P., Schaeffler, S., and Scobbie, J. M. (2014). “Pre-speech tongue movements
recorded with ultrasound,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar of
Speech Production (ISSP 10), Cologne, 300–303.
Perlmutter, D. M. (1992). Sonority and syllable structure in American sign language. Linguist. Inq. 23, 407–442.
R Core Team (2014). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing.
Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Reilly, J. McIntire, M., and Bellugi, U. (1990). The acquisition of conditionals in
American sign language: grammaticized facial expressions. Appl. Psycholinguist.
11, 369–392. doi: 10.1017/S0142716400009632
Russell, K., Wilkinson, E., and Janzen, T. (2011). ASL sign lowering as undershoot:
a corpus study. Lab. Phonol. 15, 403–422.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A Simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language (Baltim.) 50, 696–735.
doi: 10.2307/412243
Sandler, W. (1999). Prosody in two natural language modalities. Lang. Speech 42,
127–142. doi: 10.1177/00238309990420020101
Sandler, W., and Lillo-Martin, D. (2006). Sign Language and Linguistic Universals.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781139
163910
Schegloff, E. A. (1987). “Recycled turn beginnings: a precise repair mechanism in conversation’s turn-taking organization,” in Talk and Social
Organisation, eds G. Button and J. R. E. Lee (Clevedon: Multilingual Review),
70–85.
Schegloff, E. A. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for
conversation. Lang. Soc. 29, 1–63. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500001019

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 194

de Vos et al.

Stewart, J. (2014). A quantitative analysis of sign lengthening in American
sign language. Sign. Lang. Linguist. 17, 82–101. doi: 10.1075/sll.17.
1.04ste
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T.,
et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.
0903616106
Torreira, F., Bögels, S., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). Breathing for answering: The
time course of response planning in conversation. Front. Psychol. 6:284. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00284
van der Kooij, E., and Crasborn, O. (2008). Syllables and the word prosodic
system in sign language of the Netherlands. Lingua 118, 1307–1327. doi:
10.1016/j.lingua.2007.09.013
van der Kooij, E., Crasborn, O., and Emmerik, W. (2006). Explaining
prosodic body leans in sign language of the Netherlands: pragmatics required. J. Pragmat. 38, 1598–1614. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2005.
07.006

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Turn-timing in signed conversations

Wilbur, R. B. (2009). Effects of varying rate of signing on ASL manual signs and nonmanual markers. Lang. Speech 52, 245–285. doi:
10.1177/0023830909103174
Zeshan, U., and De Vos, C. (eds). (2012). Sign Languages in Village Communities:
Anthropological and Linguistic Insights. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. doi:
10.1515/9781614511496
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 de Vos, Torreira and Levinson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution
or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

March 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 268 | 195

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 18 June 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00741

The management of turn transition in
signed interaction through the lens of
overlaps
Simone Girard-Groeber 1, 2*
1
Departement Heilpädagogische Lehrberufe, University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs Education, Zurich,
Switzerland, 2 Centre de Linguistique Appliquée, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Edited by:
Marisa Casillas,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Connie De Vos,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Richard Ogden,
University of York, UK
*Correspondence:
Simone Girard-Groeber,
Interkantonale Hochschule für
Heilpädagogik, Schaffhauserstrasse
239, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland;
Centre de Linguistique Appliquée,
University of Neuchâtel,
Pierre-à-Mazel 7, 2000 Neuchâtel,
Switzerland
simone.girard@hfh.ch;
simone.girard@unine.ch
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 01 February 2015
Accepted: 18 May 2015
Published: 18 June 2015
Citation:
Girard-Groeber S (2015) The
management of turn transition in
signed interaction through the lens of
overlaps. Front. Psychol. 6:741.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00741

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

There have been relatively few studies on sign language interaction carried out within
the framework of conversation analysis (CA). Therefore, questions remain open about
how the basic building blocks of social interaction such as turn, turn construction unit
(TCU) and turn transition relevance place (TRP) can be understood and analyzed in
sign language interaction. Recent studies have shown that signers regularly fine-tune
their turn-beginnings to potential completion points of turns (Groeber, 2014; Groeber
and Pochon-Berger, 2014; De Vos et al., 2015). Moreover, signers deploy practices
for overlap resolution as in spoken interaction (McCleary and Leite, 2013). While
these studies have highlighted the signers’ orientation to the “one-at-a-time” principle
described by Sacks et al. (1974), the present article adds to this line of research
by investigating in more detail those sequential environments where overlaps occur.
The contribution provides an overview of different types of overlap with a focus of
the overlap’s onset with regard to a current signer’s turn. On the basis of a 33-min
video-recording of a multi-party interaction between 4 female signers in Swiss German
Sign Language (DSGS), the paper provides evidence for the orderliness of overlapping
signing. Furthermore, the contribution demonstrates how participants collaborate in
the situated construction of turns as a dynamic and emergent gestalt and how they
interactionally achieve turn transition. Thereby the study adds to recent research in
spoken and in signed interaction that proposes to rethink turn boundaries and turn
transition as flexible and interactionally achieved.
Keywords: conversation analysis, sign language interactions, overlap, simultaneous signing, turn transition, Swiss
German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache, DSGS)

Introduction
The precursory work of Sacks et al. (1974) on the machinery of turn-taking in conversation has
built the foundation for the conversation analytic tradition. Their ground-breaking paper described
how participants in conversation finely coordinate their turns-at-talk by minimizing both gaps and
overlaps during the transition from a current speaker to a next speaker. Subsequent research in
Conversation Analysis (henceforth: CA) has further demonstrated the robustness of Sacks et al.’s
(1974) model of turn-taking being achieved on the principle of “one-at-a-time” in interactions
involving other languages than English (e.g., Stivers et al., 2009), different contexts (informal and
institutional) as well as diverse types of speakers (e.g., L1 and L2 speakers for example by Carroll,
2000; Gardner, 2007).
June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 196

Girard-Groeber

However, research that pointed to an increased amount of
simultaneous talk or of pauses between turn transitions, has also
questioned the turn-taking machinery as a universal model (as
e.g., Tannen, 1984 or Lehtonen and Sajavaara, 1985, cited by
Gardner et al., 2009). It was suggested that linguistic and cultural
aspects are the reason for such a variation between different turntaking systems. The present study contributes to this issue by
investigating the sequential organization of social interaction in a
signed language. Signed languages make use of the sequential and
simultaneous combination of spatio-visual resources, which can
be more or less conventionalized among a specific sign language
community. To date there have been relatively few studies on
sign language interaction carried out within the framework of
CA. Interestingly however, most of the researchers working
on signed interaction have to some extent discussed the issue
of overlapping signing (e.g., Martinez, 1995; McIlvenny, 1995;
Coates and Sutton-Spence, 2001; Lackner, 2009; McCleary and
Leite, 2013; De Vos et al., 2015). Some researchers highlight
the fact that signed interaction presents a dense occurrence
of simultaneous signing, sometimes explicitly questioning the
relevance of the one-at-a-time model proposed by Sacks et al.
(1974) for signed interaction (Coates and Sutton-Spence, 2001;
Lackner, 2009). Other researchers rather emphasize the fact
that signers finely coordinate their turn beginnings to potential
completion points of current signers (McCleary and Leite, 2013;
De Vos et al., 2015).
With this paper I intend to add to this topic by a detailed
investigation of those instances in signed interaction where
participants actually overlap each other’s turns, by focusing
specifically on the sequential environment of these overlaps (i.e.,
onset of the overlap at the beginning, midst or end of the current
speaker’s turn). This type of investigation sheds light on two
issues. First, the analysis of the sequential moment of overlaps
aims at revealing whether they present an orderly organization,
as it has been shown for overlap in spoken language interaction
(cf. Section Overlaps in Spoken and Signed Interaction). Second,
the analysis of overlapping signing provides insight into how
four participants of a signed language conversation accomplish
the actual transitions from one signer to the other. On the basis
of a 33-min video-recording of a multi-party interaction with
4 female signers in Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS), the
paper shows that (1) signers overlap each other’s turns regularly
within possible transition spaces and not in the midst of syntactic
constructions, revealing therefore the same orderliness of overlap
as in spoken language interaction; (2) signers actively accomplish
smooth transitions between the current and the next signer,
collaborating thereby in a situated and collaborative construction
of turns. The findings add to recent research in spoken and in
signed interaction that proposes to conceive turn boundaries as
flexible and interactionally achieved.
I start with providing some details with regard to turntaking and overlap in signed languages (Section Research on
Turn-Taking and Overlap in Sign Language), presenting my
conception of turn and further detailing the issue of this study.
Then I present the methodology and procedure I followed for
the current study (Section Method), specifying the annotation
practice and the established categories for analysis. In Section

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

Sequential Environments of Overlapping Signing, I present the
results on different types of overlaps before I discuss these
findings in Section Discussion.

Research on Turn-Taking and Overlap in
Sign Language
The Lexical Unit in Sign Language
The lexical unit in sign language is the manual sign, which
consists of a distinct combination of four sublexical manual
parameters, namely handshape, location (in the signing space),
orientation (of the palms) and movement (Boyes Braem, 1990).
Non-manual features such as gaze direction or facial expression
can have distinctive effect on the lexical level. The sign unfolds
sequentially in three basic phases, the preparation phase (i.e.,
hands are brought from rest position to the initial location,
orientation and handshape), the stroke or independent hold (i.e.,
the proper semantic deployment of the sign) and the retraction
(i.e., after full deployment the hands are brought back to rest
position) (Kita et al., 1998). When annotating signed languages,
researchers segment lexical signs in two different ways: either
they consider end of one sign to be the start of the next sign (i.e.,
there is no gap between two signs, the transition from one sign
to the other is assigned to the second sign; cf. Figure 1), or the
start of a sign corresponds to the full deployment of the manual
parameters handshape, location and orientation and ends with
the end of the stroke, while transition phases are not part of the
sign (i.e., there is a gap between two signs; cf. Figure 2) (cf. Hanke
et al., 2012).

The Turn and Turn Construction Unit in
Conversation Analysis and Sign Language
Research
Turn and TCU in Classic CA
In spoken interaction, the beginning and the ending of a
participant’s contribution represent the delimitation of a turn.
Each turn can further be built by one or more turn construction
units (Sacks et al., 1974; henceforth: TCU)1 . Traditionally,
TCUs have been defined as grammatical segments of talk, i.e.,
lexical, phrasal, clausal or sentential constructions, which are
interactionally relevant. By interactionally relevant it is meant
that participants orient to these units as possibly complete
units that end in transition relevance places (Sacks et al.,
1974; henceforth: TRP), i.e., places where the transition to a
next speaker becomes possible. This transition is, however, not
automatic, because co-participants might not take a next turn
and current speakers can extend their turns after the possible
completion (with new TCUs or by extending the previous TCU;
Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 1996). It is important to note as
well that each TCU does not end in a TRP, which is the case
in multi-unit turns such as story-tellings. In such cases the TRP
can be blocked, for example, by lexical or pragmatic devices
(Selting, 2000), e.g., the negotiation of a multi-unit turn through a
preface.
1 As

Schegloff puts it, turns are “the organization unit which ‘houses’ grammatical
units” (1996, p. 55).

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 197

Girard-Groeber

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

Sign 1
prep

Sign 2
stroke

transition

Sign 3
stroke

transition

stroke

FIGURE 1 | Segmentation of signs including preparation and transition phases.

Sign 1
prep

stroke

Sign 2
transition

stroke

Sign 3
transition

stroke

FIGURE 2 | Segmentation of signs excluding preparation and transition phases.

The determination of TCUs has given rise to much debate
within the field of CA, about, for example, the relative importance
of syntactic and prosodic resources for the indication of
completeness of a TCU (e.g., Ford et al., 1996; Schegloff, 1996;
Selting, 1996, 2000). The importance of syntactic completion
has been demonstrated by Selting (1996). She showed that
participants finely time their recipiency tokens or early turn
starts to possible syntactic boundaries of a current speaker’s
turn, showing thereby that they rely on their understanding of
syntactic boundaries for the management of turn transitions. A
consequence of this is for example that turn-final tag questions
(in German “ne”; Selting, 1996, p. 363) are regularly overlapped
with next speaker’s turn start. However, it is not only syntax that
determines whether a TCU may be complete or not. According to
Selting, the TCU is a linguistic unit constructed with syntactic and
prosodic resources, and it is considered linguistically complete
in a given sequential and pragmatic context (Selting, 1996,
2000). She states that “[i]t is the interplay of syntax and
prosody that constitutes and delimits TCUs in general.” (2000, p.
489). Put simply, a participant can design a complete syntactic
construction but prosodic resources may indicate that there is
more to come (cf. rush-through by Schegloff, 1982)—in which
case it is not a TCU. In a similar manner, already Local and Kelly
(1986) have shown how participants use features such as pitch,
loudness and tempo or even glottal stops before a silence for
indicating that e.g., a turn is not yet complete (projection of turn
continuation) or that an overlapped turn was not complete and
will be taken up again after the overlap (Local, 1992).
While TCUs (and turns) are traditionally conceived of
as linguistic units, several researchers put into question a
logocentric definition of turns-at-talk, where the vocal production
of grammatical units appears to be a basic criterion for being
considered part of a turn (cf. recent contributions in Rasmussen
et al., 2014). Keevallik (2014) for example proposed an analysis of
(non-linguistic) vocalizations as TCUs in their own right (cf. also
Goodwin et al., 2000, on the use of nonsense syllables as TCUs
or Ford et al., 2012). In a similar vein, an increasing quantity
of research on bodily practices shows the relevance of these
resources in the construction of “turns” and in the recipient’s
orientation to these bodily practices as being constitutive for
the situated accomplishment of activities (e.g., Goodwin, 2000;

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Mondada, 2007; Oloff, 2013). In sum, these studies emphasize
the fact that social interaction is based on the participants’
accomplishment of actions by means of ensembles of resources
such as speech, gesture, posture and gaze (Kääntä, 2010, proposes
to speak of turns-of-actions). Within such a perspective, the
delimitation of TCUs becomes less important an issue, because
the focus of analysis is not on linguistic constructions but
on the practices for the organization of activities (Ford et al.,
1996).

Turn and TCU in Sign Language Research
Research on signed languages has tried to adopt and adapt the
basic notions of conversation analytic research to the situated
organization of signed dialogs or social interaction. However,
detailed discussions of how the turn and the TCU have to
be conceived of in signed interaction are still scarce (but see
McCleary and Leite, 2013; De Vos et al., 2015). The major
challenge for the conception of turns and TCUs in signed
languages arises from the fundamental multimodality of signed
discourse on the one hand, and the continuous use of lexical,
semi-lexical and gestural resources as basic building blocks of
meaning construction (Liddell, 20032 ; König et al., 2012) on
the other hand. This resonates very clearly with the current
discussions on turn and TCU by those researchers who put into
question a logocentric definition of these basic building blocks
(cf. Section Turn and TCU in classic CA).
A first fundamental issue in research on signed interaction
is how to define the beginning and the end of a turn. Lackner
(2009) considered that the lowering and lifting of the forearms
constitute turn boundaries. This entails for example that when a
participant is holding a sign, he is not yet relinquishing his turn
(cf. also Baker, 1977). De Vos et al. (2015) however delineate
turns with respect to their stroke phases, excluding therefore
the so-called non-verbal movements (holds, preparation phases
and retraction phases). This delineation is based on a study that
looked at turn transition times with three different phonetic
measures (sign-naïve turn boundaries, i.e., transition is measured
2 Signers

make regular use of so-called productive signs, i.e., signs that are
only partly conventionalized (they are semi-lexical). They constitute meaning
by depicting situations and objects rather than denoting these. Their meanings
depend heavily on context.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 198

Girard-Groeber

by considering preparation, stroke, hold and retraction phases;
stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries, i.e., the transition is calculated
by considering the time between two strokes; and a measure of
transition between the next signer’s preparation of his first sign
in relation to the end of the stroke of the current signer’s last
sign). They further calculated the latency of these transitions and
observed that for the stroke-to-stroke turn boundary, transition
times were within cultural variation from spoken languages
(i.e., 229 ms; Stivers et al., 2009). On the basis of this result
they suggest that turns have to be delineated with respect
to their strokes, whereas preparation, hold and retraction
phases are excluded from the turn. In a study on Brazilian
Sign Language, McCleary and Leite (2013) do not explicitly
state their delineation of turns. Their analyses show, however,
how a current signer self-interrupts his signing in response
to gestural movements by an incipient signer, namely a selfgroom and a palm-up gesture. Hence, the current signer is
clearly orienting to these non-verbal resources as constituting
overlapping signing that has to be resolved (even if it is
not phonological, propositional or lexical). This would be an
argument to consider such non-lexical resources as proper parts
of signed turns.
In sum, the issue of defining turn boundaries in signed
languages traces back to the question of whether non-verbal
movements, i.e., preparation phases, holds and retraction phases
as well as gestural elements such as palm-ups or even selfgrooms should be considered as being part of the turn or
not. In the present article turns are delineated in the following
way:
(1) The beginning of the turn includes the preparation phase
of the turn-initial sign. The preparation phase of a turninitial sign is comparable to a hearable inbreath in spoken
interaction, described as a pre-beginning element (Schegloff,
1996). Pre-beginning elements are non-lexical elements
such as an inbreath, coughs or gestures “which can serve
to initiate a turn, while not yet initiating a TCU within
it.” (Schegloff, 1996, p. 93). In a similar vein, Lindström
(2006) proposes a differentiation between turn and TCU
by considering presegments (e.g., pre-beginnings) and postcompletions (e.g., huh) as not being part of the core TCU, but
as a part of the possible turn. Against the background of this,
I maintain a differentiation between turns as participant’s
overall contributions including resources beyond grammar,
and the grammatical units that such turns (can) host.
(2) The end of the stroke of a potentially last sign builds a first
TRP, constituting also the end of the core grammatical unit
(De Vos et al., 2015). However, I do not consider that the
end of the linguistically built unit is automatically the end of
the turn. Non-verbal movements that follow this stroke are
considered as being part of the turn, even if they are not part
of the grammatical unit (or the TCU). Consequently, holds
after the stroke of the potentially last sign as well as additional
gestural elements such as palm-up gestures are considered as
being part of the turn. These additional elements extend the
turn and finally propose a new TRP (cf. Lindström, 2006 on
post-completers).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

The Turn-Taking Machinery in Signed Languages
Preliminary and rather detailed observations on turn-taking
in sign language can be found in Baker (1977), proposing
an account for turn transition between signers based on the
sending and interpreting of “signals” for turn regulation. Based
on conversations between two dyads of deaf signers in a semiexperimental setting, she provides an overview of initiation
regulators, continuation regulators, and shift regulators. The
initiation regulators comprise those conducts that the incipient
signer adopts for displaying that he will initiate a turn. The
most fundamental initiation regulator is moving the hands
out of rest position (in rest position the speaker’s hands are
relaxed e.g., on table or legs), providing a first visual index
that the participant launches a turn. In case of absence of
mutual gaze between participants, the incipient signer uses
an attention-getting device (he waves his hand in the visual
field of the addressee, taps on the table or the shoulder of
the addressee) in order to establish recipiency. Baker (1977)
attaches great importance to the establishment of mutual gaze by
stating that the “speaker cannot initiate a turn until the desired
addressee looks at the potential speaker” (Baker, 1977, p. 221).
As already Coates and Sutton-Spence (2001) point out however,
it seems that incipient signers regularly launch a turn even
without previously established mutual gaze and without explicit
attention-getting devices. Resources for this are restarts and holds
of sign beginnings, allowing for a smooth turn beginning (cf.
Goodwin, 1980 for restarts in spoken interaction). Continuation
regulators refer to those “signals” that manifest that the signer
will continue past a first “information package” or after a short
pause (Baker, 1977, p. 218). According to Baker, not gazing at the
co-participant, speeding up the signing and not returning to rest
position as well as holding/freezing the last sign are regulators
enabling the current signer to continue. This implies that if a
speaker is not willing to abandon his turn, he can either “fill the
pause” “with small movements that indicate planning what next to
say or by holding the final position of the last sign” without gazing
at the co-participant (Baker, 1977, p. 227). Finally, shift regulators
are a set of behaviors used by the current or the incipient signer
for signaling that the turn goes over to a next signer. Shift
regulators by the incipient signer are understood as signals he
deploys in overlap with the current signer’s turn. Baker notes that
e.g., increased size and quantity of head nods, palm-up gestures
or gaze withdrawals are indicating that a co-participant attempts
to shift from recipient status to signer status. The current signer’s
fundamental shift regulator is his gaze toward the potential next
signer, as well as a diminution of the sign rate and the return to
rest position (see also McIlvenny, 1995; McCleary and Leite, 2013
on overlap). Moreover, according to Baker, the end of a turn is
signaled by returning the hands to rest position or by holding
the last sign while gazing at the co-participant (cf. also Lackner,
2009)3 .

Overlaps in Spoken and Signed Interaction
Sacks et al. (1974) have shown that participants in social
interaction orient to a “one-at-a-time” principle for the
3 It is however not clear whether she considers the retraction phase and the hold as

still being part of the turn or not.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 199

Girard-Groeber

management of turn-taking by minimizing overlapping talk
between two or more participants. When overlap was observed
it was rather short and regularly occurred at turn-endings. In
this environment, Sacks et al. (1974) argued that the overlap
manifests the next speaker’s endeavor to project “his start to be
earliest possible start at some possible transition-relevance place”
(Sacks et al., 1974, p. 706f). This is particularly relevant in multiparty interaction where other participants possibly compete for
the next turn. Somewhat later, Jefferson (1984); Jefferson (1986)
undertook detailed analyses of the onset of overlapping turns
and the timing between turns. She found that overlap onset
regularly occurs within transition space4 (Schegloff et al., 1977),
from which she concluded that overlap is in fact an orderly
phenomenon. This does not exclude however that overlaps occur
also in the midst of turns (not in transition space). However,
even in the midst of turns overlapping talk is not necessarily
a sign of participants’ competition for the floor (French and
Local, 1983). Participants can for example exploit simultaneous
talk as a resource for creating interactional meaning (e.g., choral
co-productions of turns for the accomplishment of agreement
or the display of mutual reminiscence, Lerner, 2002). Within
word search sequences, co-participants can be provided with
the opportunity to overlap so as to re-establish the progression
of interaction (conditional access to the turn; Schegloff, 2000).
There is also possibility that overlap is actually troublesome, in
which case participants repair the simultaneous talk with specific
overlap resolution practices (Schegloff, 2000). In all of these cases,
the model “one-at-time” is in fact warranted as a basic principle,
because deviations from it are either interactionally meaningful
or repaired.
For signed interaction, Cicourel (1973; cited by McIlvenny,
1995, p. 138) suggested that deaf participants may not
be “constrained by the sequential ordering or chaining
rules, because several signers can allow their signing to
overlap continuously and several types of information can be
communicated simultaneously which fall under the general
notion of kinesic-visual communication.” In a similar vein, Baker
(1977) stated that the visual mode of interaction in sign language
“allow[s] interactants to sign and observe another’s signs without
a loss of understanding, whereas in oral languages, it is more
difficult to hear another’s speech while talking.” (Baker, 1977, p.
216). In fact, since Baker’s seminal paper there have been several
discussions especially on the issue of overlap in signed languages.
Some scholars clearly contest the validity of Sacks et al.’s “oneat-a-time model” for sign language interactions. On the basis
of informal conversations between native signers, Coates and
Sutton-Spence (2001) for example observe frequent overlapping
and conclude that deaf (female) signers do not orient to the
interactional organization of “one speaker at a time” but to a
“collaborative floor” as described in Edelsky (1981) for spoken
language interaction among women. As previously Coates and
Sutton-Spence (2001), also Lackner (2009) observes numerous
overlaps in her data of dyadic semi-experimental conversations
4 Transition space is “(...) the environment of a turn’s possible completion, at which
possible transition to a next speaker becomes relevant.” (Schegloff et al., 1977, p.
366).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

in Austrian Sign Language. She reports that in 3 of 13 dialogs
there is a preferred “successive” structure (i.e., participants orient
to the one-at-a-time organization), whereas in 4 of 13 dialogs the
participants are constantly in overlap. The rest (6 dialogs) present
a varying organization (Lackner, 2009, p. 94). Lackner (2009)
also provides some information regarding the characteristics
of the overlapping turns (cf. also Martinez, 1995). She mainly
differentiates two categories. A first category is built by minimal
responses such as GOOD, RIGHT, YES (for the manual minimal
responses), which are often realized by smaller movements and
in lower sign position than the regular signing space (i.e., they
are prosodically attenuated). A second category is formed by the
occurrences where the addressee initiates a short turn in overlap
with the current signer for the accomplishment of a question,
a complement or a comment (Martinez, 1995, p. 94). Lackner
mentions that in this case the overlapped signer waits for the end
of this overlap and then continues with his turn. Besides these
categories of simultaneous signing, Lackner (2009) refers to two
other interactional dynamics where a lot of overlaps occur. First,
she mentions dialogs where participants accomplish multiple
questions or comments during the telling of a participant. She
observes that when a current signer is overlapped with a short
question, the current signer provides an answer and continues,
and the overlapping signer regularly “echoes” this answer so
as to display his understanding. This echoing further results
in overlap. Second, Lackner (2009) refers to moments when
participants “just seem to sign simultaneously,” collaboratively
constructing the dialog (complementing and referring to each
other’s turns). According to her, this type of interaction is related
to the topic at hand (as e.g., when deafness becomes a topic
of interaction). This seems similar to observations of a highinvolvement signing style, as made by Coates and Sutton-Spence
(2001) on American Sign Language as well as Thibeault (1993,
cited by Martinez, 1995) on Filipino Sign Language interaction.
All in all, several researchers working on signed interaction point
out that overlaps and simultaneous signing are very frequent in
signed interaction. They put forward various reasons for this,
relating to contextual factors (such as the interactional topic at
hand, the high involvement of signers in the interaction and
shared experience), physiological factors (overlapping signals do
not constrain each other) or cultural factors (women talk, sign
language community).
By contrast, McIlvenny (1995) states that sequential
organization is also relevant in signed interaction, and that
this sequential organization is not so much affected by the fact
that sign language is a spatio-visual language. More recently,
several studies further pinpointed the signers’ orientation to
precision-timing and orientation to the coordinated transition
between signers on the basis of fine-grained analyses of
participants’ accomplishment of turn-taking (McCleary and
Leite, 2013; Groeber and Pochon-Berger, 2014; De Vos et al.,
2015). For example, in a recent conversation-analytic account,
McCleary and Leite (2013) provide compelling evidence for
several overlap resolution devices (Schegloff, 2000) that deaf
participants rely upon for managing overlapping signing. These
more recent studies have also demonstrated the importance
of a clear definition of overlap with respect to the movement

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 200

Girard-Groeber

phases of signs (cf. Section The Lexical Unit in Sign Language).
As already pointed out by McCleary and Leite (2013), in
early studies on sign language interaction it is often not
clear, whether the overlap between a preparation phase and
the stroke of a sign for example has been considered as an
overlap or not. Indeed, considering the movement phases of
signs/gestures, the following types of overlapping signing can be
distinguished.
As it is the stroke or independent hold of a manual sign
or gesture that houses the semantic information, an overlap
between two strokes may be of a different quality than e.g., an
overlap between a stroke and a hold. Indeed, as De Vos et al.
(2015) have shown, signers do orient to the end of strokes as
turn-boundaries (at least in question-answer sequences), and
the overlaying production of retraction, preparation and hold
does not seem to be troublesome (cf. also Groeber and PochonBerger, 2014). Nevertheless, I suggest that the other simultaneous
productions may also fall under the term overlap as these
movements are also considered as being part of the turn (even
if they are not part of the syntactic unit; cf. Section Turn and
TCU in Sign Language Research). This recalls the difference that
is made in spoken interaction between overlapping conducts
that are troublesome and others that are not troublesome.
For example, in spoken interaction an overlap between the
end of a lexical unit by speaker A with the inbreath of the
incipient speaker B is of a different quality than the overlap
between two lexical units (or overlaps between bodily conducts
and grammatical units). An issue on this behalf is that all
types of overlaps are indicated with the same transcription
symbol (square brackets, [xx])—as mentioned in Groeber
and Pochon-Berger (2014), the use of various transcription
symbols for different types of overlaps may become relevant for
documenting such differences, both in signed and in spoken
interaction.

Method
Participants and Data
The current analysis is based on a 33-min four-party interaction
in Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische
Gebärdensprache, henceforth: DSGS) between four young deaf
women: Denja, Nathalie, Isaline and Melinda. All participants
have deaf and signing parents and learned DSGS as their L1.
The data comes from a larger corpus of DSGS narratives and
interactions that has been gathered within the project “Gaze
and Productive Signing in a Corpus of Interactions of Deaf and
Hard-of-Hearing Signers of Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS),”
conducted at the University of Applied Sciences of Special Needs
Education, and funded by Swiss National Science Foundation.
Within this project, participants were invited to attend to a whole
day of recording at a film studio producing programs in sign
language. While there are some semi-experimental data, the film
under study here comes from the lunch break that was recorded
with the aim of having a maximally natural interaction. All data
was filmed with three cameras. Two cameras were positioned to
record two participants frontally, and the third camera captured
all participants together.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

Procedure and Analysis
Annotation
The annotation was done in iLex, a corpus-annotation tool
developed at University of Hamburg for sign language
documentation (e.g., Hanke, 2002), which the project team
uses for the previously cited project. The annotation was then
exported in eaf -format for an import into the multimedia
annotation tool ELAN5 . For the analysis, several tiers have been
added to the ELAN-annotation (cf. Section Analysis).
In the current state, the basic transcript consists of a content
translation (done by two interpreters), an annotation of manual
signs and participants’ gaze conduct. Manual signs have been
annotated with glosses, i.e., words taken from the spoken language
(in our case German spoken language) that roughly describe the
meaning of a sign. These glosses function as labels for a sign and
are not a precise translation. In the transcript they are always
written in capitals. As the project team is working with iLex,
the glosses in the transcripts are automatically linked to the sign
databank for Swiss German Sign Language. When a sign is not
available in the lexicon, the annotators create a new gloss, which
is automatically added to the lexicon.
In this project we segmented lexical signs in a broad way, i.e.,
the sign starts with the preparation or the transition phase of the
sign, and it ends with the end of the stroke. This implies that
the end of sign 1 is the beginning of sign 2, and that there are
no gaps between signs (cf. Figure 1, Section The Lexical Unit in
Sign Language; Hanke et al., 2012 on sign segmentation). The
annotation by the gloss therefore includes the preparation phase
or the transition phase of the sign as well as the stroke of the
sign. The stroke starts with the full deployment of the sign’s
handshape and initial orientation and position. The stroke ends
when all manual parameters of the sign are realized (handshape,
orientation, location, and movement) (cf. also De Vos et al.,
2015). By contrast to De Vos et al. (2015) and McCleary and
Leite (2013) we did not include the retraction phase, the return
to rest position, into the gloss. For the excerpts under discussion
in this article, we added a notation of the gesture phases (Kita
et al., 1998) of the manual signs, making the types of overlapping
signing more explicit (McCleary and Leite, 2013; De Vos et al.,
2015). The detailed transcription conventions are represented in
Table 2.
A range of other non-manual components such as eyebrows
or mouthings6 are important aspects of sign language. They
will be regarded as such in the analysis, but they are not (yet)
systematically annotated over the whole corpus.

Analysis
In what follows I briefly outline the different analytical steps
that I undertook for the current study once the glosses and gaze
conducts have been annotated in ELAN.
5 The

reason for this is that by the moment of analysis, I was more familiar with
search functions implemented in ELAN than in iLex.
6 A mouthing is the unvoiced articulation of a word or word part from the spoken
language lexicon which is used in the hearing community surrounding the Deaf
sign language community (Boyes Braem, 2001, p. 99). In our case, the mouthings
are thus German words or word parts.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 201

Girard-Groeber

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

(1) Identification of those overlaps relevant for the current study.
As mentioned in Section The Turn-Taking Machinery in
Signed Languages, there are different types of overlaps with
respect to their quality. In this study the analysis is limited to
one specific type of overlap, by excluding:
• When the preparation phase of a participant’s sign
overlaps with the stroke or the retraction phase of another
participant’s sign; the reason is that there is no overlap
on a semantic level (cf. Figure 3, cases b and c in Section
Overlaps in Spoken and Signed Interaction; cf. De Vos
et al., 2015).
• When a participant is holding a turn-final sign for a
moment and another participant produces a sign that
is overlapping the hold (cf. Figure 3, case d, in Section
Overlaps in Spoken and Signed Interaction, cf. Groeber
and Pochon-Berger, 2014). The reason is that the end of
the stroke may constitute a first TRP, while the hold is
extending the turn. There is no overlap on a semantic
level.
• When non-manual conducts such as head shake or head
nod from one participant overlap the manual sign of
another participant. This decision is due to the fact that I
did not look at the non-manual turns; whether such types
of overlaps should be considered as overlaps to the same
extent as overlaps between signs is a question that cannot
be addressed in this paper.
Each overlap was tagged in ELAN on a separate analysis tier.
On the basis of participants’ gaze conduct I then chose to
distinguish between two types of overlaps. Most frequently,
overlaps occur between participants who are gazing at each
other, either at the beginning, the end or over all their turns.

prep

stroke

retr

prep

stroke

retr

prep

stroke

retr

prep

stroke

stroke

retr

prep

prep

This implies that at some point there is mutual orientation
and participants can perceive their simultaneous production.
Another type of overlap consists of simultaneous signing between
two participants while they are addressing a third person through
their action and gaze conduct. This type of overlap can go totally
unnoticed by the participants (i.e., there is no mutual orientation;
cf. also McIlvenny, 1995 on that topic of simultaneous turn
beginnings). Such overlaps occur frequently after lapses. The
data under study presents a total of 382 overlaps. Out of these,
331 instances occur between two or more participants who
are gazing at each other at some point during the overlap. In
the remainder of this paper, only those 331 cases are further
investigated.
(2) Description of the overlapping turn with respect to action.
For each overlap I attempted to tag the action that the
participants accomplished with that turn. While some turns
were easily interpretable on the basis of the next-turn proof
procedure7 (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 728), other actions were
more difficult to determine, especially in those courses of
action that consist of storytellings.
(3) Description of the sequential environment of the overlapping
turn’s onset with respect to the overlapped turn. The analysis
of all relevant overlaps resulted in a categorization of the
overlaps in three main sequential environments:
7 The

next turn proof procedure is a basic methodological tool within CA for the
analysis of interaction within a participant’s perspective. For the assignment of
actions in interaction, analysts are held to ground their interpretation on how
participants themselves understand an action. This necessitates an analysis over
three turns, where A is accomplishing an action (e.g., information elicitation),
B displays then what he understands this action to be by means of his response
(e.g., providing information), and A then either confirms or disconfirms that B has
understood adequately.

a) Overlap between two strokes

b) Overlap between stroke and preparation or retraction phase
retr

c) Overlap between preparation and retraction phase

prep

stroke

stroke

hold

retr

prep

stroke

retr

retr

d) Overlap between hold and stroke

FIGURE 3 | Different types of overlaps.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 202

Girard-Groeber

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

• The overlap occurs at a first possible completion place
reached by participant A (cf. cases A and B in the table
below).
• The overlap occurs near the end of a unit or the potential
end of a unit (but not exactly at the transition place) (cf.
cases C and D in the table below).
• The overlap occurs in the midst of a unit (cf. case E).

Sequential Environments of Overlapping
Signing
This section provides an overview of different types of
simultaneous signing that can be observed in the data under
study. While several authors have commented on the types
of actions that are implemented by overlapping turns (e.g.,
minimal response, repair, short queries, or comments; Martinez,
1995; Coates and Sutton-Spence, 2001; Lackner, 2009), the
sequential environments of the overlap onsets have not yet
been differentiated systematically in previous studies on signed
languages. For this differentiation, I investigate the sequential
environments where an incipient signer overlaps an ongoing
turn of a current signer. It is important to highlight that the
analytic focus is primarily on the sequential environment at
the turn-level, i.e., whether the overlap occurs at the beginning,
in the midst or the end of a possible turn. The overlap onset
at the lexical level (i.e., with respect to the movement phases
within isolated signs) is visible also in the transcripts, but it is
not the focus of analysis in this paper (but see De Vos et al.,
2015).

Simultaneous Signing at Places of Possible
Completion
One turn environment where simultaneous signing occurs is at
first possible completion of a signer’s unit (Table 1, cases A and
B; cf. also Jefferson, 1984). At the precise moment for example
where participant A (light gray in Figure 4) reaches a possible
end of a turn, e.g., the end of the interrogative unit I HUNGRY
(marked by the end of the stroke of the sign HUNGRY), another
participant B (gray in Figure 4) may launch into a turn. If
participant A actually does not continue after this completion, we
would observe a smooth turn transition. If however, participant
A continues after that first possible completion while participant
B also launches into a turn, an overlap occurs8 .
An additional aspect to the overlap onset pertains to the design
of overlapped turns. When participant A continues with his turn
after a possible completion, this continuation can be independent
from the first part (Section Overlapping a Current Signer’s New
Unit at Places of Possible Completion), or it can be syntactically
dependent (Section Overlapping a Current Signer’s Dependent
Unit at Places of Possible Completion).

Overlapping a Current Signer’s New Unit at Places of
Possible Completion
The first excerpt illustrates an overlap occurring at a place of
possible completion between a current signer, Nathalie, and a
new signer, Melinda. The segment stems from a repair sequence
initiated by Melinda concerning an exchange that she missed
8 Note

that when A is reaching a possible syntactic completion, it is also possible
that, precisely timed to the end of this completion two ‘new’ participants launch a
turn, overlapping each other.

TABLE 1 | Categories of overlap onset tagged in ELAN.
Category

Overlap onset with respect to the
current signer’s turn

Explanation

Quantification

(Participant A = current signer; participant B = incipient/overlapping
signer)

A

Start of new unit

At a first TRP, i.e., after the stroke of
the potentially last sign

Both participant A and participant B launch a unit which is syntactically
independent from what precedes (new syntactic construction); this can
occur after a pause or straightforwardly after a TRP

B

Extension of unit

At a first TRP, i.e., after the stroke of
the potentially last sign

Participant B launches a turn and participant A adds one or several signs
after his initial TRP; these signs are dependent from the first part of the turn;
this can occur after a pause or straightforwardly after a TRP

C

End of unit

During the stroke of the last item of a
turn

Participant A produces the last item of his turn (and then retracts his hands),
participant B’s turn-initial sign (stroke) overlaps the deployment phase
(stroke) of that last item

7/331 (2.1%)

D

Potential end of
turn followed by
continuation

During the stroke of an item that
could be the last item of the turn

Participant A produces an item that could be the last item of the turn,
participant B’s turn-initial sign (stroke) overlaps the deployment phase
(stroke) of that potentially last item—but after that item A continues with
additional signs or with a new (syntactically independent) unit

146/331 (44.1%)

E

Midst of unit

After the beginning of a syntactic
unit, not in potential transition space

Participant B launches a turn while participant A’s turn is not yet reaching a
possible completion

35/331 (10.6%)

F

Undetermined

33 (10%)
Total overlaps

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

110/331 (33.2%)

331

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 203

Girard-Groeber

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

POTENTIAL TURN
UNIT 1

UNIT 2

I
prep

HUNGRY
str

prep

GO
str

EAT

prep

str

prep

str

prep

str

prep

str

I

TRP

TOO
UNIT 1
POTENTIAL TURN

FIGURE 4 | Overlap onset at first possible completion.

FIGURE 5 | Annotation grid excerpt 1, corresponding to lines 07–09.

between Nathalie and Isaline. Isaline said that she really dislikes
her eyes without make-up because they appear so big. Nathalie
responds to this by expressing her surprise. During this exchange,
Melinda averts her gaze from the participants while she is
drinking (she presumably sees however Isaline saying that she
dislikes something and the expression of surprise by Nathalie).
After Nathalie’s display of surprise, Melinda initiates repair by
asking Nathalie what Isaline dislikes. When Nathalie reaches
a potential completion of her repair, Melinda starts a turn
(addressed to Isaline) while Nathalie is continuing with a “new”
unit, resulting in simultaneous signing.
The excerpt is presented as follows: a rough gloss annotation
of the larger sequence is provided first, followed by a content
translation. The part of these transcripts that are in bold are
then represented again in the format of the ELAN annotation,
so as to provide some more details on the temporal unfolding
of the overlap under discussion (Figure 5). In the ELAN
annotation, each participant is represented with a different color
and comprises several tiers. The labeling of the tiers is further
explained in the transcription conventions (Table 2).
Excerpt 1 (Corpus InterGaze, 00:06:41)
Gloss annotation of larger sequence
01
Isa:
I HATE I NOT MAKE-UP prod-sub-eyes

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

02
03
04
05
06

Nat:
Mel:
Nat:

07
08
09

Mel:

HATE I
REALLY YOU REALLY
[WHAT HATE WHAT
[I LIKE prod-skizz-small eyes LIKE TIRED
(FALL-ASLEEP DEAD) I prod-skizz-small
eyes WITHOUT
IX(isa) WITHOUT MAKE-UP $HES
IX(eyes) prod-sub-big eyes IX(isa)
[I REALLY
[I TOO I

Translation of larger sequence
01
Isa:
I hate my eyes without make-up – they look
so big,
02
I hate that
03
Nat:
Oh really?
04
Mel:
[what does she hate?
05
Nat:
when I don’t put make-up my eyes appear
very small
06
I look like exhausted without make-up
07
she told me that without make-up her eyes
look so big
08
[and I was like ‘really?’
09
Mel:
[me too

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 204

Girard-Groeber

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

TABLE 2 | Annotation conventions.
TIERS IN ELAN (PER PARTICIPANT)
Translation_Nat

Tier for content translation of Nathalie’s contribution

Gaze_1_Nat

Gaze conduct of Nathalie (participant 1)

RH_Gloss_1_Nat

Gloss for the sign produced on right hand by Nathalie

LH_Gloss_1_Nat

Gloss for the sign produced on left hand by Nathalie

BH_Gloss_1_Nat

Gloss for the sign produced on both hands by Nathalie (for
two-handed signs)

RH_phas_Nat

Gesture phases for the sign produced on right hand

LH_phas_Nat

Gesture phases for the sign produced on left hand

BH_phas_Nat

Gesture phases for the sign produced on both hands

TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS FOR THE HAND TIERS RH_GLOSS_1_
NATH ETC.
BALL

Gloss for standardized sign of DSGS

BALL-pl

Plural for BALL

IX(isa)

Pointing toward the person/object in brackets

B-A-L-L

Fingerspelling/Fingerspelled letters (B, A, L)

PALM-UP

A sign/gesture with palms oriented upwards

PALM-DOWN

A sign/gesture with palms oriented downwards

$HES

Hesitation or interrupted sign

D-HAND

Hand configuration of a fingerspelled D, but does not have a
clear directional movement as a pointing

prod-man-needle

Productive sign (semi-lexical sign) that consists of a depiction
of an object, animate referent or a situation (cf. also depicting
signs). Productive signs are annotated with the image
producing technique they use (Langer, 2005) and with a
reformulation of what they represent
Image producing techniques:
Man: manipulative technique (cf. also handle classifier)
Skizz: sketching technique (cf. also size and shape specifier)
Sub: substitutive technique (cf. also entity classifier)

-H

Hold of a sign/gesture

TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS FOR THE MOVEMENT PHASE TIER
prep

Preparation of the sign/gesture, i.e., movement out of rest
position

str

Stroke

retr

Retraction

-H

Hold

TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS FOR THE GAZE TIER
D, DD

To the right

G, GG

To the left

D: down

Down

den, nat, isa, mel

Toward Denise, Nathalie, Isaline or Melinda

Nathalie’s repair turn (l.07-08) consists of two parts. She starts
with reporting that Isaline told her that without make-up
Isaline’s eyes look so big (red rectangle). This part finishes
with the referential pointing toward Isaline (IX(isa) on the tier
LH_Gloss_1_Nat; l.07) which is doubling the same pointing at
the beginning of the unit. This type of reduplication of a pronoun
is frequent in several signed languages and has been described
as a prosodic marker (e.g., Crasborn et al., 2012). Nathalie then
launches into the second unit of her turn with I REALLY “I
said ‘really?” (on the tier LH_Gloss_1_Nat; l.08), reporting her
response to Isaline (highlighted in blue).
It is in overlap with this second part of the turn, that the
repair initiating party Melinda takes a turn that displays her

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

re-established understanding by affirming that she has the same
problem (I TOO I, “me too,” on the tier RH_Gloss_3_Mel;
l.09). Interestingly, Melinda’s response to Nathalie’s repair is
finely tuned to the moment when the element she addressed
as repairable has been mentioned, namely what does Isaline
dislike (“her big eyes”). At this point, she therefore orients to
pragmatic completion, as her repair initiation did not ask for
anything more than “what does she/Isaline hate.” Note also that
Melinda launches a response to the repair after the reduplication
of the sign IX(isa), where the first part is markedly finished
on a syntactic and prosodic level. What we see here is thus
precisely what Jefferson (1986) describes as possible completion
onset, where “[a] recipient reasonably, warrantedly treats some
current utterance as complete, ‘transition ready,’ and starts to
talk, while (..) the current speaker, perfectly within his rights,
keeps going.” (Jefferson, 1986, p. 154). Considering the movement
phases of the overlapping signs, it is interesting to note the
following: while Nathalie and Melinda overlap each other by
respectively extending and launching a turn, it is only the stroke
of REALLY (LH_phas_Nat) that is overlapped with a stroke by
Melinda (RH_phas_Mel). The other overlaps concern strokes
and preparation phases. Interestingly, the preparation phase of
Melinda’s I (RH_phas_Mel) is rather long (350 ms)9 —it may
be possible that Melinda stretches the preparation phase of I in
response to the fact that Nathalie is extending her turn (overlap
resolution device; McCleary and Leite, 2013).
The excerpt illustrates a regular way of turn transition between
signers: incipient signers do not necessarily wait for the current
signer relinquishing the floor by retracting the hands to rest
position. Rather they fine-tune their turn-beginnings to the
end of grammatical and prosodic units (cf. also Selting, 1996,
2000 for spoken interaction) marked by the stroke of the turnfinal sign. This is similar to the phenomenon observed in
spoken interaction, where participants do not normally wait for
a pause after a turn for launching a new turn. By contrast,
participants finely monitor ongoing turns for their actional,
syntactic and prosodic completion10 . In the present data 33.2%
of all overlaps occur at potential completion points where
participants reasonably guess that a turn is finished (cf. Table 1),
while the current participant continues past possible completion.
In excerpt 1, the current signer continues the turn with a
second unit that is syntactically independent from what precedes.
By contrast, excerpt 2 illustrates a case where the signer’s
continuation consists of a unit that is dependent on the initial
unit.

Overlapping a Current Signer’s Dependent Unit at
Places of Possible Completion
This type of overlap occurs when participant A reaches potential
completion, and participant B launches a turn while participant
9 Out

of 47 annotated preparation phases, 43 instances are less than 250 ms.
According to De Vos et al. (2015) this implies that these beginnings are precisiontimed even if the preparation phase of participant B is launched after the stroke of
participant A.
10 This is not only the case for transitions between a current and a next signer, but
also for cases where a current signer is reaching completion and two new signers
launch into a turn.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 205

Girard-Groeber

A continues with one or several further signs that are dependent
from the first part. The sequential onset of overlap by the
incipient signer is therefore exactly the same as described in
Section Overlapping a Current Signer’s New Unit at Places of
Possible Completion, but the design of the overlapped turn part
of the current signer is different.
Excerpt 2 presents a simple case of a short overlap between
Melinda and Nathalie within a discussion on the different
possible origins of pimples (Figure 6). Melinda tells that in the
past she had a lot of pimples because of her worries at work (l.04).
After this first unit she extends her turn with a second unit, a
PALM-DOWN gesture, which could be translated as “that’s how
it was” (l.05). This second part of the turn is overlapped with
Nathalie’s acknowledging response that can be translated as “you
see” with a PALM-UP gesture directed toward Melinda (l.06).
Excerpt 2 (Corpus InterGaze, 00:08:12)
Gloss annotation of larger sequenc
01
Nat:
I MAINLY I STRESS I [I D-HAND
02
Mel:
[I TOO I
03
Nat:
[PALM-UP
04
Mel:
[FORMER PIMPLE_pl I COOK WORK
05
[PALM-DOWN
06
Nat:
[PALM-UP(mel)
Translation of larger sequence
01
Nat:
I have them mainly due to stress
02
Mel:
me too
03
Nat:
[that’s life
04
Mel:
[before I had a lot of pimples because of
my worries at work,
05
[that’s how it was
06
Nat:
[you see
Nathalie launches her acknowledging response to
Melinda’s telling, a PALM-UP gesture directed to Melinda
(RH_Gloss_1_Nat; l.06), in precise overlap with the last item of
Melinda’s turn, the gesture PALM-DOWN (RH_Gloss_3_Mel;
l.05). Considering the movement phases of the overlapping

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

gestures, it becomes clear that Nathalie launches her responsive
PALM-UP near the end of the stroke of Melinda’s sign WORK,
the final sign of her first unit. Thus, Nathalie orients to this
moment as reaching potential completion where she can
acknowledge Melinda’s telling and display her understanding.
Melinda’s turn however continues with a sign PALM-DOWN,
which she adds without any manual prosodic disruption (i.e.,
no pause or slowing down before PALM-DOWN). Despite
the absence of a manual prosodic break after WORK, Melinda
deploys a resource that indicates a possible completion after
WORK—she averts her gaze from her co-participant (to the
right side) during the deployment of WORK (cf. DD on the
tier Gaze_3_Mel). Baker (1977) described gaze aversion from
co-participants as recurrent in turn-beginnings, where they
are exploited as a resource for displaying cognitive planning
and holding the turn (cf. also Kendon, 1967). Turn-endings
have by contrast have been described as being accompanied
with a gaze oriented to the co-participants, indicating thereby
that the current participant yields the turn to a next signer
(Martinez, 1995; Baker, 1977). This has been observed also
as predominant in question-answer sequences in a dyadic
teacher-student interaction in Swiss German Sign Language
(Groeber, 2011). Both the teacher and the student orient their
gaze toward their co-participant at the end of both questions
and answers (in 90–100% of cases). An important difference
with the excerpt under study here is however that after Melinda’s
telling (l.04) no projection for a next action is pending (Auer,
2002). The topical talk can continue (as it actually will by Isaline
taking a turn), or it could also be closed down. This clearly
contrasts with the collection under study in Groeber (2011),
where the questions set a strong projection for information
provision, while the answers set a projection for an evaluation
(cf. three-turn structure in teaching context; Mehan, 1979). In
the light of these observations, Melinda’s gaze aversion during
WORK rather indicates the upcoming completion of a sequence
similarly to what Rossano (2012) describes for spoken language.
Consequently, the addition of PALM-DOWN at the end of
Melinda’s turn can be qualified as a resource that enables Melinda
to smoothly step out of her turn. This extension by means of a

FIGURE 6 | Annotation grid excerpt 2, corresponding to lines 04–06.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 206

Girard-Groeber

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

short non-lexicalised item results in an overlap that is similar
to the turn-final overlaps of tag questions described by Selting
(1996; cf. Section Turn and TCU in Classic CA). In fact, the
excerpt represents a recurrent way of how signers in the present
data end their turns. We will take this issue up again with
excerpts 3 and 5.
Excerpts 1 and 2 have shown the fine coordination of
incipient signers to possible completion, which implies that
the overlapping signing is not the result of mistiming. Signers
therefore precisely time their turn beginnings to such places
within the temporal unfolding of turns, where syntactic
boundaries occur. The overlaps are the result of the fact that the
current speaker is not ending her turn at this point, but extends
her turn.

of a full or partial retraction, or it can be filled with a hold11 . The
case is schematized in Figure 7 below.
When participant A continues with his turn after some pause
after a possible completion, he can do this either by starting a
new unit or by adding elements that are somehow dependent
on the first part of the turn (as in Section Simultaneous Signing
at Places of Possible Completion). In this section I present an
example of the first case in excerpt 3 (Figure 8). Denja finishes
a first unit (l.02), followed by a pause (0.6 s with a hold). After
this pause she launches a second unit (l.03) at the same time as
her co-participant Nathalie (l.04).
Excerpt 3 (Corpus InterGaze, 00:23.32)
Gloss annotation of the larger sequence:
01
Den:
SECOND SECURITY IMPORTANT
GOOD
02
BUT LEGISLATION D-HAND BAD
STOP +(0.6) −H+

Simultaneous Signing after Places of Possible
Completion
A further environment where simultaneous signing occurs is just
after a possible completion of a signer’s unit, i.e., when some
pause has occurred after the first possible completion place (i.e.,
the end of the stroke of the turn-final sign). This pause can consist

11 Also for this type of overlap it is possible that two new participants launch a turn
after a pause that followed the completion of participant A.

POTENTIAL TURN

UNIT 1
I
prep

Pause

HUNGRY
str

prep

UNIT 2

-H

str

hold

GO
prep

EAT
str

prep

str

prep
prep

I
TRP

str
str

TOO
UNIT 1

TRP

POTENTIAL TURN

FIGURE 7 | Overlap onset after first possible completion.

FIGURE 8 | Annotation grid excerpt 3, corresponding to lines 02–04.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 207

Girard-Groeber

03
04

Nat:

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

[I SURPRISED I +(0.4) −H+]
[SIMILAR BEFORE IX(v) SCHOOL I]
SCHOOL I LEARN –A-B-U-12 I TOO I
TOPIC LEGISLATION...

Translation of the larger sequence:
01
Den:
security is important and very good
02
but legislation is bad
03
[I am surprised
04
Nat:
[that’s like at school
05
I learned at school, in ‘general
knowledge’ we also treated the
topic legislation . . . .
The segment starts with Denja affirming that Switzerland is a very
safe country, but that there is poor legislation resulting in too
mild sentences, as for example for the punishment of rapists or
murderers (BUT LEGISLATION D-HAND BAD STOP -H, on the
tiers RH_Gloss_Den/BH_Gloss_Den; l.01-02, with headshake
that starts in parallel to the sign BAD). At the end of the sign
BAD, Denja’s turn reaches a first possible syntactic and pragmatic
completion. She continues however with the sign STOP, after
which again speaker change may occur. This sign STOP is then
held for 0.6 s, and she expands her headshake that she began in
parallel to the sign BAD). Nathalie provides an acknowledging
response by means of a head nod that is precisely timed to
the end of the sign BAD; this head nod extends simultaneously
to the sign STOP and the further -H (hold). With this nonmanual acknowledgment the course of action has reached some
completeness and there is no constraint regarding who of the
participants takes a turn. Nathalie might take a full turn during
Denja’s -H, i.e., she could launch a turn going beyond her nonmanual acknowledgment, but her hands remain in rest position.
By contrast to Nathalie’s turn-ending in excerpt 2, where her gaze
aversion from the co-participant was interpreted as a possible
sequence closing resource, Denja is gazing at Nathalie during
her -H. I suggest that by means of these resources she invites
Nathalie to take a turn and elaborate on the topic (cf. Stivers and
Rossano, 2010 for spoken language). In a recent contribution,
Groeber and Pochon-Berger (2014) proposed that turn-final
holds embody the participant’s expectation of the fulfillment
of a pending action (as e.g., an answer to a question). In
the current excerpt, the turn-final hold also contributes to the
embodiment of an expectation for a continuation, even if there
is no action projection under way, i.e., there are no constraints
(in terms of sequence organization) on how the interaction is
expected to continue. Both Nathalie’s turn-launching at the end
of Denja’s hold and Denja’s further simultaneous turn extension
corroborate this idea. Denja finally continues her turn by adding
to her first part of the turn (red rectangle) that this is what
she realized (I SURPRISED I, tier RH_Gloss_Den; l.03). In
overlap with the preparation phase of I, also Nathalie finally
takes a turn by launching the preparation phase of her turninitial sign SIMILAR (tier BH_Gloss_1_Nat; l.04), orienting
12 ABU is commonly used abbreviation for ‘Allgemeinbildender Unterricht’
(teaching in general knowledge).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

thereby to Denja’s previously deployed resources (-H and gaze)
as yielding the floor to her. This simultaneous beginning after the
completion point results in overlap (highlighted in blue).
I suggest that from the end of BAD, Denja creates a negotiation
space (over the signs STOP and its -H) where participants deal
with the determination of a next signer in a subtle and situated
manner. This is a most relevant interactional task especially in
moments where no projection is pending, which means that
there is neither constraint with respect to the next action to be
accomplished, nor with respect to whom of the participants will
get the floor (cf. also excerpt 2).
It is interesting to note that when Nathalie has finally
taken over the turn, Denja does not drop out of the overlap
immediately, but she brings her new unit to an end (l.03).
However, Nathalie clearly orients to the simultaneous signing as
a potentially troublesome overlap, as she restarts the overlapped
turn-beginning (SCHOOL I, l.04) as soon as the simultaneous
signing quits.
In Sections Simultaneous Signing at Places of Possible
Completion and Simultaneous Signing after Places of Possible
Completion, I have shown that overlaps in signed interaction are,
in a lot of cases, orderly (Jefferson, 1984, 1986). They can be a
result of the participants’ orientation to syntactic and pragmatic
completion points of current signers, by launching a turn either
at the first possible completion point (stroke of turn-final sign), or
slightly past a first possible completion point (after a short pause).
In what follows I show that participants can also anticipate
an upcoming completion point and launch a turn while the
current signer is approaching a first possible completion point
(cf. Table 1, categories C and D; 153/331 overlaps, 46.2%).

Simultaneous Signing before Places of Possible
Completion
The anticipation of an upcoming possible completion can result
in different types overlap. Relevant for this study are those
overlaps where the stroke of participant A’s final sign overlaps
with the stroke of participant B’s final sign. This is illustrated in
Figure 9 below.
The anticipation can be correct, and the participant A
finishes his turn within one sign (as in Figure 9 and Section
Overlapping a Current Signer’s Last Item of a Unit), or it
can be erroneous and the participant A continues, either with

POTENTIAL TURN
UNIT 1
TRP
I
prep

HUNGRY
str

prep

str
prep

str

prep

I

str

TOO
UNIT 1
POTENTIAL TURN

FIGURE 9 | Overlap onset before first possible completion.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 208

Girard-Groeber

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

more than one sign, or even with a new syntactic unit (Section
Overlapping a Current Signer’s Potentially Last Item of a
Unit).

Overlapping a Current Signer’s Last Item of a Unit
In this section I present an illustration of such cases where a
participant B starts signing while participant A is producing the
last sign of a unit. These types of overlaps show that participants
can foreshadow potential turn-endings. This corresponds to what
Jefferson (1986) treats as terminal onset and more precisely “last
item” onset, where the final sounds of a last word by a current
speaker are overlapped with the beginning of a new speaker. In
excerpt 4, Denja and Melinda are talking about Denja’s pimple
which she has had for 2 weeks (Figure 10).
Excerpt 4 (Corpus InterGaze, 00:07:41)
Gloss annotation of the larger sequence:
01
Den:
(XX) THEREUNDER SEE YELLOW
THERE IX(pimple) PALM-UP
02
[prod-man-squeeze pimple CAN NOT -H
03
Nat
[(YOU) ALREADY prod-man-needle TRY
[YOU
04
Isa:
[$HES WAVE(isa)
05
Den:
[ZERO I
Translation of the larger sequence:
01
Den:
(xx) one sees it’s yellow
02
but I cannot squeeze it
03
Mel:
[did you try with a needle [(you)?
04
Isa:
[euhm denja
05
Den:
[no I didn’t
Denja is reporting that she was not able to squeeze the pimple
despite the fact that it was all yellow. In overlap with this (which
is not the focus of this analysis), Melinda is addressing a question
to Denja, namely whether she has already tried to pick it with
a needle [(YOU) ALREADY prod-MAN-needle TRY YOU, tier
RH_Gloss_3_Mel; l.03; red rectangle]. Denja launches an answer

(ZERO I, “no I didn’t,” tier RH_Gloss_Den; l.05) to this question
while Melinda is still producing the stroke of her last sign of her
question, the sign YOU (l.03; highlighted in blue). Such examples
show that signers can project incipient turn completions and
launch into the transition even before the current signer has
actually finished. Surprisingly, in the data under study here
at least, cases where a signer provides minimal responses or
launches a new turn in overlap with a sign “under way” (during
the stroke deployment) that will actually be the last sign of the
turn are very rare (7/331 overlaps; 2.1%; cf. Table 1). For those
minimal responses and turn starts that arise in overlap, it is
much more frequent that they occur during the deployment of
a potentially last item, i.e., that after that item the current signer
continues with her turn (cf. also Section Simultaneous Signing at
Places of Possible Completion). In the next section I will focus on
those instances in more detail and propose a discussion on the
possible reasons for the frequent accomplishment of this type of
turn transition.

Overlapping a Current Signer’s Potentially Last Item
of a Unit
Current signers are recurrently overlapped during a potentially
last item of a unit, after which they continue their turn (146/331;
44.1%; cf. Table 1). Frequently the overlapping participants are
providing only short acknowledgments, hence they are not
claiming the floor and the current signer can continue without
any disruption. While such turn continuations may have been
projected (as e.g., in a storytelling before the climax), other
continuations rather seem to occur in the absence of a fuller turn
taking by a potential next speaker. Excerpt 5 presents such a case
(Figure 11). In excerpt 5, Isaline’s acknowledging response (l.04)
is overlapping the potential end of Nathalie’s turn (l.03). The two
women are talking about rapists and appropriate prison sentence.
Excerpt 5 (Corpus InterGaze, 00:24:32)
Gloss annotation
01
Nat:
EXAMPLE (NAME) PALM-UP

FIGURE 10 | Annotation grid excerpt 4, corresponding to lines 03–05.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 209

Girard-Groeber

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

FIGURE 11 | Annotation grid excerpt 5, corresponding to lines 02–06.

02
03
04
05
06

Isa:
Nat:

GOOD PALM-UP
IX(name) BUT I SAY (xx) HOW[-LONG
[PALMDOWN
WE-SEE
PALM-UP

Translation of larger sequence:
01
Nat:
for example (name)
02
(okay)
03
(name) but then I say for how long (will it
last)?
04
Isa:
yes exactly
05
Nat:
that’s what we’ll see
06
we don’t know
Nathalie says that she wonders for how long a rapist who is
freed from prison will go before relapse (BUT I SAY HOWLONG, ON TIER RH_GLOSS_1_Nat; l.03). The sign HOWLONG (produced on the right hand) is accompanied with a head
tilt back and raised brows (question design; Boyes Braem, 1990).
Isaline orients to this moment in Nathalie’s turn as potentially
reaching some completion; in overlap with the stroke of HOWLONG (l.03) she deploys an acknowledging response that consists
of a lifting of a PALM-DOWN gesture with a prolonged mouthing
of the letter—e-13 (this could be translated as “exactly” or “yes
that’s it”). Simultaneously to the preparation phase of Isaline’s
acknowledgment PALM-DOWN, also Nathalie lifts her left hand
(while on the right hand she still signs HOW-LONG) and
produces a PALM-UP (tier LH_Gloss_1_Nat; l. 06), which she
holds for a moment.
Interestingly, when Nathalie sees Isaline’s preparation phase
of her acknowledgment (raising the hands out of rest position),
Nathalie could relinquish the floor by retracting her hands
into rest position (i.e., after the sign HOW-LONG). However,
Nathalie still prepares and holds her PALM-UP on the left hand
13 The mouthing –e- may be related to the German word “eben” (“there you have
it”), which is also conventionally used with the sign EBEN consisting of a palm-up
gesture.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

until Isaline has again retracted her hands to rest position.
Different hypotheses can be drawn up for explaining Nathalie’s
-H: first, Nathalie may thereby indicate that she does not
want to relinquish the turn, i.e., that she is holding the floor.
However, -H as a floor-holding device has been described as
being accompanied with gaze aversion from the participants
(Baker, 1977). Moreover, as the continuation of the excerpt
shows, Nathalie will not add a lot of material after this -H but
rather launch into a closing of the sequence (l.05-06). A second
possibility is that, by means of her -H, Nathalie embodies her
expectation of Isaline’s response (Groeber and Pochon-Berger,
2014). However, when Nathalie starts holding her sign, Isaline
has already provided a response with her acknowledgment.
There is thus not strong evidence for this explanation. A
possible explanation that was already mentioned for excerpts
2 and 3, is that Nathalie uses both the PALM-UP and the H as resources for a smooth stepping out of the turn, creating
thereby the opportunity for a turn transition that is not abrupt
but fluid. While Isaline is invited to take a turn beyond her
acknowledgment, Nathalie does not immediately end her turn
but fills in the delicate moment of transition with these resources.
This is further corroborated with Nathalie’s continuation in the
absence of Isaline’s turn-taking. Nathalie extends this negotiation
space with the extension by SEE (“that’s what we’ll see,” tier
LH_Gloss_1_Nat; l.05) during which Nathalie averts her gaze
from the co-participant (cf. excerpt 2 for a similar case). It
is only after the simultaneous and sequential combination of
all these resources that Nathalie retracts her hands to rest
position. However, even after having retracted her hands to rest
position (on the table), she then further extends the turn with
a short PALM-UP accompanied with a shrug of the shoulders
(“we don’t know,” tier LH_Gloss_1_Nat; l.06). This is again
accompanied with a glance toward Isaline, who still does not take
a turn.
In sum, this excerpt showed that Isaline overlaps a possible
last item of Nathalie’s turn. Nathalie continues with some further
signs, which seem to be deployed as a resource for the smooth
management of turn transition or turn endings. It is interesting
to note that this subtle stepping out of a turn is again occurring

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 210

Girard-Groeber

at a moment where no specific action projection is set for the
continuation of the sequence (cf. excerpt 2).
Up to this point I focused on those overlaps that occur within
transition space, corroborating the orderliness of overlapping
signing as it has been shown in spoken interaction. A further
sequential moment where overlaps occur is what I term within
units. Jefferson (1986) refers to such overlaps has having an
“interjacent onset.”

Simultaneous Signing Within Units
A last sequential moment of overlapping signing is when
participant B launches a turn in the midst of a syntactic
construction by participant A. This type of overlap is rare in the
data under study (35/331 overlaps, 10.6%). While the sequential
moment of these overlaps does not manifest any coordination
between the participants with respect to turn management,
an interesting question to ask is what actions participants
accomplish by means of these overlapping turns. In what follows I
provide a brief description of the principal actional environments
in which these overlaps occurred. Note however that each case is
very specific with respect to the involvement of the participants
and the coordination processes (mutual gaze and orientation).
A first environment where participants overlap each other
with interjacent onset is in courses of actions involving repair
(7/35 cases). The overlapping party is either self-initiating
other-repair, providing a self-initiated other-repair, or displaying
his understanding after having launched a repair sequence
(sequence-closing third; change-of-state token, Heritage, 1984).
As the establishment and maintenance of intersubjectivity is a
condition for social interaction to happen, repair appears to be
an action that is legitimately accomplished at any place. A second
environment of interjacent overlap is built by those moments
where participants either display their early understanding (by
reformulating a current signer’s turn) or by displaying that they
share experience with the current signer. By these overlapping
turns participants exhibit their alignment with a participant, and
at the same time they inform each other about their epistemic
status with respect to what is being told (10/35 cases). A third
environment is built by courses of action where the overlapping
participants display their strong disagreement with a current
signer’s turn (3/35).
Sometimes participants also provide acknowledgments that
are not fine-tuned to transition space but come in midst of a
syntactic construction. In 3 of 4 cases, this acknowledgment
ensues the introduction of a reference by means of list
construction.

Discussion
The Orderliness of Overlaps in Multi-Party Signed
Interaction
The turn-taking organization is one of the most basic analytic
tools we have in CA for the analysis of broader interactional
phenomena (such as repair organization or preference). In order
to understand how members of a community accomplish courses
of action, and establish and negotiate meaning in a situated
and dynamic way, we have to first understand how turns and

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

turn-taking are organized. There is still little research on social
interaction in signed languages that adopts a conversationanalytic perspective. To date, we have been provided with some
descriptions of how signers indicate their incipient speakership,
or their willingness to keep a turn or assign a turn to a next
participant. These descriptions do not necessarily follow the
analytical mentality of conversation analysis. As a consequence of
this, the notions of turn, TCU and TRP are still rarely discussed in
detail in this field. Moreover, a most basic issue that has given rise
to contradictory assumptions among researchers is the question
of whether Sacks et al.’s (1974) turn-taking machinery is also
valid for signed languages (e.g., Martinez, 1995; McIlvenny, 1995;
Coates and Sutton-Spence, 2001; McCleary and Leite, 2013).
This study did not pursue the question of whether in signed
languages there is indeed more overlapping “talk” as compared
to spoken interaction. With the analytical focus chosen for
this study, the present results provide the field with an initial
systematic sketch of the sequential environments of overlaps
in signed interaction. Using the conversation analytic tools for
studying the organization of signed interaction data allowed us
to see how participants themselves treat ongoing turns (as being
complete or not) and overlaps (as being troublesome or not).
The preceding analyses have shown that the vast majority of
overlaps produced among four young female signers frequently
occur within the sequential environment of possible completion
(79.4% of all overlaps; Sections Simultaneous Signing at Places
of Possible Completion, Simultaneous Signing after Places of
Possible Completion, and Simultaneous Signing before Places
of Possible Completion), i.e., they rarely occur in the midst
of syntactic units (10.6% of all overlaps; 4.4). This shows that
participants finely tune their turn beginnings to those places in
the dynamics of interaction, where turns are possibly complete.
Hence, the majority of overlaps results from the fact that incipient
signers anticipate a turn-end and overlap it, and/or that current
signers continue beyond a first possible completion. The findings
therefore underpin the observed orderliness of overlapping talk
in spoken language interaction (Jefferson, 1984, 1986; Schegloff,
2000). Adding to recent findings that demonstrated signers’
orientation to precision-timing (De Vos et al., 2015) as well as
practices for overlap resolution (McCleary and Leite, 2013), the
current study further substantiates the claim that sign language
users, too, orient to a turn-taking machinery based on the
principle of “one-at-a-time.”
The data showed that signed overlap is not messy but
organized. Admittedly, however, this does not disprove the
assumption that signed interaction presents more simultaneous
“talk” than spoken interaction, as proposed by Coates and
Sutton-Spence (2001) or Lackner (2009). It might well be that
signers start their overlaps in an organized manner, and then
continue while simultaneously signing for longer stretches than
it has been shown for spoken interaction. While I did not
systematically investigate the length of the overlaps or overlap
resolution practices, the description of what actions participants
accomplish with the overlapping turns nevertheless provides us
with some valuable insights. Major actions accomplished are
acknowledgments, agreements and displays of understanding by
means of short reformulations. Furthermore, overlapping turns

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 211

Girard-Groeber

were often observed in courses of action involving repair (repair
initiations, repairs or change-of-state tokens). Within these
actions, overlapping signing does however not imply that the
“one-at-a-time” principle is invalid. In fact, participants orient to
the fact that the default organization is one-at-a-time by keeping
their turns short (as in acknowledgments and agreements), or by
accomplishing actions that can reasonably overlap ongoing turns
because of their urgency (repair initiations) or because of the
interactional effects it thereby creates (e.g., strong disagreement).
It seems therefore that the observations made on overlaps in
spoken interaction are also applicable to the data under study
in this article. Consequently, prolonged simultaneous signing
and the existence of one-at-a-time principle are not necessarily
mutually exclusive.

Gradual Turn Endings and Smooth Turn
Transitions
An important finding of the present study is that ‘last item
overlaps’ are scarce (cf. Section Overlapping a Current Signer’s
Last Item of a Unit). By contrast, participant B often overlaps a
potentially last item of participant A who however continues past
a possible completion (cf. Section Overlapping a Current Signer’s
Potentially Last Item of a Unit). This may raise the question of
whether participants erroneously predict turn-endings. Another
hypothesis would be that current signers who are confronted
with overlapping signing by their co-participants continue their
turns as a means of holding the floor. While the methodological
tools of CA do not allow answering the first question, the
sequential analyses of overlapping signing provide some evidence
for answering the second one. The analyses have shown that at
first places of possible completion, current signers’ continuations
regularly consist of one or more items, short add-ons. These
added items often consist of non-lexical elements or signs that do
not contribute substantially new information (PALM-UP, PALMDOWN, STOP, -H). Moreover, after these add-ons, signers often
finish their turns. This provides evidence, from a participants’
perspective, that there is in fact no attempt to hold the floor.
By contrast, on the basis of a fine-grained investigation of the
collaborative work accomplished by the signer and his recipient’s
during possible turn transition, the present analyses suggest
that participants deploy such short add-ons as an interactional
resource for the management of turn transitions. Concretely,
participants step out of their turns in a gradual and smooth
manner.
These add-ons can occur after a pause (Section Simultaneous
Signing after Places of Possible Completion) or latched to a
first possible completion (Section Overlapping a Current Signer’s
New Unit at Places of Possible Completion; cf. also Section
Overlapping a Current Signer’s Last Item of a Unit). In the first
case, the turn continuation can serve as a resource for treating
a problem of recipiency, similarly to turn extensions in spoken
language (e.g., Horlacher, 2007). In the second case however,
participants may accomplish a slightly different interactional
task. When participants continue their turns without any pause
after possible completion, they may deal with the fact that neither

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

of their co-participants launches into a turn that goes beyond a
minimal response. Hence, the turn extension by a current signer
is not oriented to an absence of response, but an absence of a turnlaunching that will substantially add to the progression of the
activity at hand (cf. e.g., excerpt 6). Concretely, the current signer
therefore extends the turn boundary so as to permit a smooth
transition without notable pauses between turns.
These observations provide us with some interesting insights
regarding turn transition in signed languages. On the one hand,
the present study supports that incipient signers orient to the end
of strokes/independent holds as first possible transition places
where they can launch a new turn (Groeber and Pochon-Berger,
2014; De Vos et al., 2015). On the other hand, as it has been
shown for spoken languages, linguistic (syntactic and prosodic)
units within a pragmatic context are “possible turns,” which can
be further expanded with different types of constructions. Thus,
turn boundaries are not fixed but flexible. Moreover, and this is a
consequence of this first point, the transitions from one signer to
the next are also not always clear-cut—within the transition space
current and next signers overlap each other as a consequence
of the fact that current signers regularly trail-off their turns,
stepping out of them in a smooth manner. Consequently, an
interesting hypothesis to pursue is the idea that a sense of
more overlap in signed interaction may be due to the fact that
participants regularly step out of turns in a gradual and smooth
manner, rather than ending them with an abrupt retraction of the
hands/forearms to rest position. This practice for designing turn
transitions may be a specificity of signed languages, but more data
has to be investigated to corroborate this idea.
Indeed, it must be emphasized that the present results are
limited to one constellation of participants (four acquainted
women) and a limited range of courses of action (questionanswer sequences, storytellings). Whether the same type of turn
transition can be found with other participants (male group,
mixed group, unacquainted participants, L2 signers) is an open
question. Moreover, as the excerpts in Sections Simultaneous
Signing after Places of Possible Completion and Simultaneous
Signing before Places of Possible Completion suggest, a
systematic analysis of turn-endings that set a strong actional
projection as compared to those without strong projection (e.g.,
questions vs. comments) will be necessary for a more detailed
understanding of signers’ management of turn-taking.

Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding
from the Swiss National Science Foundation under the grant
agreement number 100012_147154/1. I would like to thank all the
participants who took part in the project “Gaze and Productive
Signing in a Corpus of Interactions of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing
Signers of Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS).” Thanks to
Katja Tissi and Sandra Sidler-Miserez for their expert comments
on the excerpts. Finally I would like to thank the two reviewers
for their detailed and constructive criticism and suggestions on
an earlier version of this paper.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 212

Girard-Groeber

References
Auer, P. (2002). Projection in interaction and projection in grammar. Interact.
Linguist. Struct. 33, 1–43.
Baker, C. (1977). “Regulators and turn-taking in American sign language
discourse,” in On the Other Hand, ed L. Friedman (New York, NY: Academic
Press), 215–236.
Boyes Braem, P. (1990). Einführung in die Gebärdensprache und Ihre Erforschung.
Hamburg: Signum Verlag.
Boyes Braem, P. (2001). “Functions of mouthings in the signing of deaf early
and late learners of Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS),” in The Hands are
the Head of the Mouth, eds P. Boyes Braem and R. Sutton-Spence (Hamburg:
Signum), 99–131.
Carroll, D. (2000). Precision Timing in Novice-to-Novice L2 Conversations. Issues
Appl. Linguist. 11, 67–110.
Cicourel, A. (1973). Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social
Interaction. London: Macmillan.
Coates, J., and Sutton-Spence, R. (2001). Turn-taking patterns in Deaf
conversation. J. Sociolinguist. 5, 507–529. doi: 10.1111/1467-9481.00162
Crasborn, O., Van der Kooij, E., and Ros, J. (2012). On the weight of phrasefinal prosodic words in a sign language. Sign Lang. Linguist. 15, 11–38. doi:
10.1075/sll.15.1.02cra
De Vos, C., Torreira, F., and Levinson, S. (2015). Turn-timing in signed
conversations: coordinating stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries. Front. Psychol.
6:268. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00268
Edelsky, C. (1981). Who’s got the floor? Lang. Soc. 10, 383–421.
Ford, C. E., Fox, B. A., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). Practices in the construction
of turns: the ‘TCU’ revisited. Pragmatics 6, 427–454. doi: 10.1075/prag.6.3.07for
Ford, C. E., Thompson, S. A., and Drake, V. (2012). Bodily-visual
practices and turn continuation. Dis. Process. 49, 192–212. doi:
10.1080/0163853X.2012.654761
French, P., and Local, J. (1983). Turn-competitive incomings. J. Pragmat. 7, 17–38.
doi: 10.1016/0378-2166(83)90147-9
Gardner, R. (2007). “‘Broken starts’: bricolage in turn starts in second language
talk,” in Language Learning and Teaching as Social Interaction, eds Z. Hua,
P. Seedhouse, L. R. Wei, and V. Cook (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan),
58–71.
Gardner, R., Fitzgerald, R., and Mushin, I. (2009). The underlying orderliness in
turn-taking. Examples from Australian talk. Aust. J. Commun. 36, 66–89.
Goodwin, C., Goodwin, M. H., and Olsher, D. (2000). “Producing sense with
nonsense syllables: turn and sequence in the conversations with a man with
severe aphasia,” in The Language of Turn and Sequence, eds B. Fox, C. Ford, and
S. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 56–80.
Goodwin, C. (1980). Restarts, pauses, and the achievement of mutual gaze at
turn-beginning. Soc. Inq. 50, 272–302. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00023.x
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction.
J. Pragmat. 32, 1489–1522. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00096-X
Groeber, S. (2011). “Understanding social interaction with bimodal bilingual
language learners: focus on turn-taking,” in Talk at the 33. Jahrestagung der
Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (Göttingen).
Groeber, S. (2014). Interactional Competence of Hard-of-Hearing Adolescents:
The Management of Progressivity in an Integration Classroom. Unpublished
Doctoral Thesis, University of Neuchâtel.
Groeber, S., and Pochon-Berger, E. (2014). Turns and turn-taking in sign
language interaction: a study of turn-final holds. J. Pragmat. 65, 121–136. doi:
10.1016/j.pragma.2013.08.012
Hanke, T. (2002). “iLex - A tool for sign language lexicography and corpus
analysis,” in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (Paris: ELRA), 923–926.
Hanke, T., Matthes, S., Regen, A., and Worseck, S. (2012). “Where does a sign
start and end? Segmentation of continuous signing,” in 5th Workshop on the
Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus
and Lexicon Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) (Istanbul),
S.69–74.
Heritage, J. (1984). “A change-of-state token and aspects of its
sequential placement,” in Structures of Social Action, eds J. M.
Atkinson and J. Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
299–345.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

Horlacher, A.-S. (2007). La dislocation à droite comme ressource pour l’alternance
des tours de parole: vers une syntaxe incrémentale. TRANEL 47, 117–136.
Jefferson, G. (1984). “Notes on some orderlinesses of overlap onset,” in Discourse
Analysis and Natural Rhetoric, eds V. D’Urso and P. Leonardi (Padua: Cleup
Editore), 11–38.
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on ’latency’ in overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.
doi: 10.1007/BF00148125
Kääntä, L. (2010). Teacher Turn-Allocation and Repair Practices in Classroom
Interaction. A Multisemiotic Perspective. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Jyväskylä.
Keevallik, L. (2014). Turn organization and bodily-vocal demonstrations.
J. Pragmat. 65, 103–120. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2014.01.008
Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze direction in social interaction. Acta
Psychol. 26, 22–63. doi: 10.1016/0001-6918(67)90005-4
Kita, S., Van Gijn, I., and Van der Hulst, H. (1998). “Movement phases in signs
and co-speech gestures, and their transcription by human coders,” in Gesture
and Sign Language in Human-Computer Interaction, eds I. Wachsmuth and M.
Fröhlich (Berlin: Springer), 23–35.
König, S., Konrad, R., and Langer, G. (2012). “Der Wortschatz der DGS,” in
Handbuch Deutsche Gebärdensprache, eds H. Eichmann, M. Hansen, and J.
Hessmann (Hamburg: Signum), 111–164.
Lackner, A. (2009). Turn-Taking und Dialogstruktur in der Oesterreichischen
Gebärdensprache. Eine Gesprächsanalyse der Salzburger Variante, Vol. 81.
Hamburg: Das Zeichen.
Langer, G. (2005). Bilderzeugungstechniken in der Deutschen Gebärdensprache
(Hamburg: Das Zeichen), 254–270.
Lehtonen, J., and Sajavaara, K. (1985). “The silent Finn,” in Perspectives on
Silence, eds D. Tannen and M. Saville-Troike (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing
Corporation), 193–201.
Lerner, G. (2002). “Turn-sharing. The choral co-production of talk-in-interaction,”
in The Language of Turn and Sequence, eds C. E. Ford, B. A. Fox, and S. A.
Thompson (New York, NY: Oxford University Press), 225–258.
Liddell, S. (2003). Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lindström, J. (2006). Grammar in the service of interaction: exploring
turn organization in Swedish. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 39, 81–117. doi:
10.1207/s15327973rlsi3901_4
Local, J. (1992). “Continuing and restarting,” in The Contextualization of Language,
eds P. Auer and A. di Luzio (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 273–296.
Local, J., and Kelly, J. (1986). Projection and Ćsilences’: notes on phonetic
and conversational structure. Hum. Stud. 9, 185–204. doi: 10.1007/BF001
48126
Martinez, L. (1995). “Turn-taking and eye gaze in sign conversations between deaf
Filipinos,” in Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities, ed C. Lucas (Washington,
DC: Gallaudet University Press), 272–306.
McCleary, L., and Leite, T. A. (2013). Turn-taking in Brazilian sign language:
evidence from overlap. J. Interact. Res. Commun. Disord. 4, 123–154. doi:
10.1558/jircd.v4i1.123
McIlvenny, P. (1995). “Seeing conversations: analyzing sign language talk,” in
Order: Studies on the Social Organisation of Talk and Embodied Activities, ed
P. Ten Have and G. Psathas (Washington, DC: University Press of America),
129–150.
Mehan, H. (1979). Learning Lessons. Social Organization in the Classroom.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mondada, L. (2007). Multimodal resources for turn-taking: pointing and
the emergence of possible next speakers. Dis. Stud. 9, 194–225. doi:
10.1177/1461445607075346
Oloff, F. (2013). Embodied withdrawal after overlap resolution. J. Pragmat. 46,
139–156. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2012.07.005
Rasmussen, G., Hazel, S., and Mortensen, K. (2014). A Body of Resources - CA
Studies of Social Conduct: Special Issue for the Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 65.
Amsterdam: Elsevier B.V.
Rossano, F. (2012). “Gaze in conversation,” in The Handbook of Conversation
Analysis, eds J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), 308–329.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.1353/lan.1974.0010
Schegloff, E. A. (1982). “Discourse as an interactional achievement: some uses of
’uh huh’ and other things that come between sentences,” in Analyzing Discourse:

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 213

Girard-Groeber

Text and Talk, ed D. Tannen (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press),
71–93.
Schegloff, E. A. (1996). “Turn organization: one intersection of grammar and
interaction,” in Interaction and Grammar, eds E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S.
A. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 52–133.
Schegloff, E. A. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for
conversation. Lang. Soc. 29, 1–63. doi: 10.1017/s0047404500001019
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., and Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for selfcorrection in the organisation of repair in conversation. Language 53, 361–382.
doi: 10.1353/lan.1977.0041
Selting, M. (1996). On the interplay of syntax and prosody in the constitution of
turn-constructional units and turns in conversation. Pragmatics 6, 371–388.
doi: 10.1075/prag.6.3.06sel
Selting, M. (2000). The construction of units in conversational talk. Lang. Soc. 29,
477–517. doi: 10.1017/S0047404500004012
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Overlaps in multi-party signed interaction

Stivers, T., and Rossano, F. (2010). Mobilizing response. Res. Lang. Soc. Int. 43,
3–31.
Tannen, D. (1984). Conversational Style: Analysing Talk Among Friends. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Thibeault, A. (1993). “Overlap in Filipino sign language discourse,” in Paper
Presented at Communication Forum, ed E. Winston (Washington, DC:
Gallaudet University), 207–218.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Girard-Groeber. This is an open-access article distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use,
distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal
is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 741 | 214

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 15 September 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01326

Suspending the next turn as a form
of repair initiation: evidence from
Argentine Sign Language
Elizabeth Manrique 1* and N. J. Enfield 1, 2
1
Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2 Department of
Linguistics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Edited by:
Manuel Carreiras,
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain
and Language, Spain
Reviewed by:
Marcel Giezen,
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain
and Language, Spain
Brendan Costello,
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain
and Language, Spain
*Correspondence:
Elizabeth Manrique,
Language and Cognition Department,
Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525
XD Nijmegen, Netherlands
elizabeth.manrique@mpi.nl
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 13 March 2015
Accepted: 18 August 2015
Published: 15 September 2015
Citation:
Manrique E and Enfield NJ (2015)
Suspending the next turn as a form of
repair initiation: evidence from
Argentine Sign Language.
Front. Psychol. 6:1326.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01326

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Practices of other-initiated repair deal with problems of hearing or understanding what
another person has said in the fast-moving turn-by-turn flow of conversation. As such,
other-initiated repair plays a fundamental role in the maintenance of intersubjectivity in
social interaction. This study finds and analyses a special type of other-initiated repair that
is used in turn-by-turn conversation in a sign language: Argentine Sign Language (Lengua
de Señas Argentina or LSA). We describe a type of response termed a “freeze-look,”
which occurs when a person has just been asked a direct question: instead of answering
the question in the next turn position, the person holds still while looking directly at
the questioner. In these cases it is clear that the person is aware of having just been
addressed and is not otherwise accounting for their delay in responding (e.g., by
displaying a “thinking” face or hesitation, etc.). We find that this behavior functions as
a way for an addressee to initiate repair by the person who asked the question. The
“freeze-look” results in the questioner “re-doing” their action of asking a question, for
example by repeating or rephrasing it. Thus, we argue that the “freeze-look” is a practice
for other-initiation of repair. In addition, we argue that it is an “off-record” practice, thus
contrasting with known on-record practices such as saying “Huh?” or equivalents. The
findings aim to contribute to research on human understanding in everyday turn-by-turn
conversation by looking at an understudied sign language, with possible implications for
our understanding of visual bodily communication in spoken languages as well.
Keywords: conversation analysis, Argentine Sign Language, visual-gestural modality, “freeze-look”, otherinitiation of repair, questions, responses

Introduction
People in interaction use and interpret meaningful hand and facial gestures spontaneously and
frequently as part of their efforts to express themselves and to understand others when formulating
turns in conversation. In spoken languages, these visible behaviors form an integrated multimodal
system with speech, where the visible and audible signs are linked pragmatically, semantically, and
temporally (McNeill, 1992; Kendon, 2004; Enfield, 2009). In sign languages, visible behavior bears
the entire load: People rely solely on visual-gestural communication when producing linguistic
signs and communicative gestures, coordinating multiple bodily resources including manual,
facial, and head signs and movements (Klima and Bellugi, 1979; Emmorey, 2001; Sandler and
Lillo-Martin, 2006). But no matter what combination of modalities and semiotic resources is

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 215

Manrique and Enfield

used, all language users are faced with the challenge of
maintaining mutual understanding in the turn-by-turn flow of
conversation (Clark, 1996).
Problems of perception or understanding in conversation
occur very often, with other-initiation of repair occurring on
average around once every 100 s (Dingemanse et al., in press).
To understand how these alerts are handled in real time, we
must focus on the basic organizational structure of everyday
conversation, namely the sophisticated systems of turn-taking
(Sacks et al., 1974; Stivers et al., 2009; Levinson and Torreira,
2015) and sequence organization (Clark, 1996; Schegloff, 2007).
When a person asks a question, they are taking a turn at talk
of the kind that obliges another person to produce an answer or
other relevant response in the next turn. Different responses can
be displayed. An addressee can simply answer a question directly
if that is possible. But if they do not understand or do not hear the
question clearly, they have the option of initiating repair by the
questioner, for example by saying in English “Sorry?,” “What?,”
“Huh?,” or “Can you repeat that?.” This is called other-initiation
of repair, abbreviated as OIR (Schegloff et al., 1977; Dingemanse
et al., 2013; Dingemanse and Enfield, 2015).
Research on other-initiation of repair to date has been done
almost exclusively on spoken languages, in telephone and face-toface interaction, with a fairly limited sample of languages beyond
English (see Dingemanse and Enfield, 2015; Hayashi et al.,
2013 for recent crosslinguistic studies). Despite an explosion of
recent research on sign language in linguistics and related fields,
there is relatively little research on interactional structures and
mechanisms in sign languages, especially where such research
focuses on naturally-occurring interaction. Available studies deal
with aspects of turn-taking in American Sign Language (Baker,
1977), tactile Sweden Sign Language (Mesch, 2001), Brazilian
Sign Language (McCleary and Leite, 2013), and Sign Language
of the Netherlands (de Vos et al., 2015), as well as repair practices
in American Sign Language (Dively, 1998), and Tactile Australian
Sign Language (Willoughby et al., 2014). The present study draws
on an extensive corpus of videotaped conversation (both dyadic
and multi-party) in a sign language, giving extensive access to
spontaneously occurring data on repair practices that rely solely
on the visual-gestural modality.
Though repair practices have been traditionally defined as
dealing with problems of “speaking, hearing, and understanding”
(Schegloff et al., 1977), in sign language these must instead be
understood as problems of “signing, seeing, and understanding.”
Signers use a variety of body articulators in coordinated ways
to produce visible linguistic information: these include hand
movements, facial expressions, eye gaze, head, and body postures
and mouth action signs (Baker, 1977; Baker-Shenk, 1983; SuttonSpence and Woll, 1999; Boyes-Braem et al., 2001; Liddell, 2003;
Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006; Vermeerbergen et al., 2007).
Other-initiated repair can in principle be produced by any of
these articulators or, more commonly, by a combination of them
in the repertoire of Argentine Sign Language (LSA) practices
(and in other sign languages). Ongoing research on LSA is
investigating the full set of types of OIR found in a conversational
corpus (Manrique, in press). The “freeze-look” behavior
described and analyzed in this article is one of these OIR types.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

There are obvious and important differences between the role
of the visual modality in spoken vs. signed languages, and it may
be expected that these affect the ways in which people encounter
and handle problems of perception and understanding. We
will distinguish between the seeing problems that can lead to
other-initiation of repair in sign languages, vs. the hearing
problems that can occur in spoken languages. Yet there have
been recent suggestions of strong commonalities between signed
and spoken languages in this domain. Enfield et al. (2013)
compare linguistic and conversational mechanisms in relation to
problems of understanding in a sample that included LSA and
20 spoken languages across the globe, with results suggesting
linguistic and conversational universals in social interaction. LSA
signers have the same basic functional options as those described
for spoken languages, such as “open” vs. “restricted” formats
for other-initiation of repair (Dingemanse and Enfield, 2015;
see below for definitions). Another study (Floyd et al., 2014),
focusing on the use of “holds” in OIR sequences in LSA and two
unrelated spoken languages, Italian and Cha’palaa, also suggests
commonalities across signed and spoken languages concerning
the function and timing of final-turn holds. In this study visual
bodily, including head, face, hands, or torso, or any combination
of these components, was compared when initiating repair to
another person. This visual bodily behavior is characterized by
the maintenance of at least one of these components as strategy of
pursuing a resolution of understanding problems. This study has
shown that in most of the cases the hold behavior was disengaged
only once the person who has initiated repair had heard or seen
some or all of the repair solution-turn produced by the person of
the trouble source.
If we are going to understand how systems of turn-taking are
managed in real time, it is crucial to understand how problems
of perceiving or understanding are dealt with on the spot. After
all, given the fast pace and constant forward progression of turnby-turn conversation, if a problem is not fixed immediately then
the chance to fix it may quickly be lost. This paper provides a
perspective from sign language analysis with the broader aim to
gain a better understanding of the general phenomenon of repair
as a back-up mechanism for possible threats to the collaborative
progress of conversation.
Other initiated-repair occurs necessarily in dialogue, and
specifically within the context of conversational turn-taking. A
basic OIR sequence has three turn elements (Dingemanse et al., in
press). The center or pivotal point in the sequence is the initiation
of repair (here referred to as T0). T0 points back to the previous
turn and identifies it as problematic in some way. This previous
turn is termed the trouble source of the sequence (referred to
as T-1). Usually, T0 explicitly asks that T-1 should be fixed in
some way: examples are Huh?, What?, Who?. Following T0 is the
repair solution (or T+1), produced by the person who produced
the original trouble source turn. We refer to the producer of
the trouble source and repair solution as Person A, and the
person who initiates the repair sequence as Person B. If the repair
solution by Person A is not sufficient to solve the problem, then
Person B might pursue with another initiation of repair asking
for more clarification or repetition, thus expanding the sequence.
Once B is satisfied with the solution he or she may provide an

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 216

Manrique and Enfield

uptake turn (T+2) indicating or at least claiming that he/she
has now satisfactorily heard/seen or understood what was said
(Schegloff et al., 1977; Clark, 1996).
Our focal point of interest here is the linguistic format of T0,
the nuclear turn of the sequence, in which other-initiation of
repair is done. T0 turns can display different forms to indicate
different problems of perception or understanding in spoken
language. Two macro categories of OIR are defined by how they
specify the scope of the problem that Person B is targeting in
the previous turn. These are “open” and “restricted” categories of
OIR (Dingemanse and Enfield, 2015). Open type repair initiators
do not specify what the problem is or where it is located in
the previous turn produced by Person A: examples of open
type repair initiators include Huh? and Pardon?. These repair
initiators point to the entire previous turn as problematic. By
contrast, restricted type repair initiators specify what the problem
is and where it is located: examples include Who? and They said
what?. These specific types of repair initiators limit the scope of
the problem, indicating that the problem is not with the entire
previous turn but a part of it.
Previous research on other-initiation of repair has focused
on explicit or on-record ways of initiating repair on other
participants’ turns. If a speech act is on-record this means that
it is non-deniable. For example, if one makes a threat in onrecord form (e.g., “If you don’t pay up I will hurt your family”),
then one would be unable to plausibly deny (say, in court)
that it had been a threat. By contrast, a communicative act
is done off -record “if it is done in such a way that it is not
possible to attribute only one clear communicative intention
to the act” (Brown and Levinson, 1987, p. 211). An off-record
strategy (such as “You should probably pay up. By the way,
how is your family? It would terrible if something happened to
them”) might be obvious in its communicative intention and
yet that intention would be plausibly if not at least technically
deniable. Off-record strategies are typically used when people
want to avoid possible consequences of being held to account for
having performed certain social actions. This is sometimes for
legal reasons as in the case of the threat, or perhaps more often
it is a way of minimizing the “face-threatening” nature of many
types of speech act (Brown and Levinson, 1987). If someone does
a communicative act in an off-record way, they are technically
leaving it open to the other person to decide how to interpret
that act.
In the domain of other-initiation of repair, if a person says
“Huh?” or similar known OIR strategy then they are initiating
repair in an on-record way. They would be unable to deny
that they had intended to momentarily suspend the progress of
the conversation in order to resolve a problem of perception
or understanding. Here we aim to expand current knowledge
of OIR systems by describing a systematic off -record practice
for initiating repair. This is the “freeze-look,” observed here
in LSA: a question is posed, but this question is a source of
trouble for the one who is required to provide an answer; rather
than providing an answer, the addressee produces a freeze-look,
meaning that they hold their body and manual articulators still
while gazing directly at their interlocutor. In these cases signers
continue looking at the questioner without giving any signal that

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

an answer is coming soon. They do not move, and are thus not
visibly “gearing up” to respond. We find that the questioner
typically treats this practice in the same way as they would
treat an open format of other-initiated repair (such as “Huh?”),
namely, by repeating or rephrasing the question. We argue that
this “freeze-look” behavior is a dedicated but off-record practice
for open other-initiation of repair in LSA. The practice allows
us to distinguish between on-record OIR and off-record OIR
practices in visual-gestural modality in a sign language, and it
suggests a distinction in OIR strategies that might be found in
other languages, including spoken languages.

Argentine Sign Language (LSA)
LSA is used in Argentina, mostly in the city of Buenos Aires,
Greater Buenos Aires, Cordoba, and Mendoza. According to the
last official report (INDEC1 ) in 2010, there are 289,321 hearingimpaired people in Argentina out of a total population of the
country of 41.499 million people. However, there are no official
surveys regarding LSA users. LSA is influenced in some ways
by contact with Spanish, for example in the common use of
Spanish words, either mouthed or fingerspelled. Members of
the LSA community vary with respect to their background: a
small minority are deaf with deaf parents, most are deaf with
hearing parents, others are hearing but have learned to use the
language, for example because their parents or other family
members are deaf. Beyond the schooling system, deaf clubs
and associations provide a context in which LSA is used and
learned.
LSA is historically related to Italian Sign Language
(Veinberg, 1996). Previous work on the language includes
mainly description of the grammar (Massone and Machado,
1992; Massone and Curiel, 1993; Curiel and Massone, 2004),
dictionaries (Massone, 1993; Valassina, 1997), and work on deaf
bilingual education, interpretation, and other issues (Behares
et al., 1990; Veinberg, 1996).

Data and Method
The LSA data used in this study were sampled from recordings
of everyday informal dyadic and multi-party interactions made
in Deaf clubs and Associations in Buenos Aires, Argentina. LSA
users usually meet in these places to interact and share social,
educational, sport and political activities. The recordings were
filmed without modifying the natural and daily environment of
the signers where they normally carry out their activities. The
recordings were done as unobtrusively as possible. Participants
were not given any instructions or tasks to perform. All
participants were native LSA2 adult friends. Both men and
women took part. The materials were collected with fully
informed consent under formal ethics clearance approved
by the funding body (European Research Council) and the
1 Available

online at: http://www.censo2010.indec.gov.ar/resultadosdefinitivos_
totalpais.asp.
2 We classify native signers as proficient individuals that have been exposed to a
sign language, in this case LSA, from birth or infancy from their caregivers.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 217

Manrique and Enfield

host institution (Max Planck Society), and also in line with
ethical guidelines of the DOBES program (Documentation
of Endangered Languages). All the videos were recorded in
institutional settings where the relevant authorities authorized
the recordings in advance. All participants were informed about
the purposes of the research (namely, the study of language use
in naturally occurring interactions) and all gave consent before
being filmed. Participants signed informed consent statements
that provided information about the study, the researchers, and
the institutions responsible. They gave permission for the data
to be used for research and educational purposes including
academic and educational publications. The informed consent
forms were written in Spanish and were also translated into LSA
by the first author (a certified interpreter in LSA), who collected
the data.
The video corpus was collected by the first author between
2010 and 2012. It was filmed using two high definition cameras
(Canon HDV). For this study, a sample was taken from the
larger corpus by selecting segments of between 10 and 20 min
from different recordings to ensure a variety of interactions
and participants, totalling 1 h and 50 min of conversation. In
this selected part of the corpus 59 signers have participated,
between 20 and 80 years old, 35 men and 24 women. Two
hundred and thirteen cases were collected to form a set of cases
of other-initiation of repair (OIR) for a large-scale comparative
research project (see Dingemanse and Enfield, 2015; Manrique,
in press). The cases collected were transcribed and translated
in collaboration with native signer consultants. From this set,
10% (23 out of the 213) were identified as cases of the “freezelook” behavior we focus on here. 23 signers, 15 men and 8
women, between 20 and 65 years old have participated in
this smaller collection of examples. These “freeze-look” cases
were transcribed, glossed, annotated, and translated into English
in the transcription software ELAN (Wittenburg et al., 2006).
The transcription consisted of sign-by-sign translation into
Spanish3 following the original sign order, done in collaboration
with native LSA consultants. These were annotated using sign
language glosses and linguistic notational conventions based on
the Johnston (2010) system for sign languages, drawing also
on Jefferson’s spoken language conversation notation system
(Jefferson, 2004, 2015), with some innovations specific to LSA
(Manrique, 2011). The examples collected for the OIR collection
were translated into English.

Coding
The basis for identifying and coding the “freeze-look” behavior
for this study include formal criteria of the behavior, and
distributional criteria in terms of the conversational sequence in
which the behavior occurs. The formal criterion of the “freezelook” action itself is that the body is held still and the gaze is
directed straight at the other person. This alone is not enough,
though: there is also a distributional criterion for this study,
namely that the behavior occurs immediately after a question by
3 The data were transcribed in written Spanish because LSA does not have a written
system for this purpose. Most of the signers are bilingual in spoken Spanish and
LSA. They use Argentinian Spanish in everyday life for fingerspelling, mouthing,
speaking, writing and reading.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

the other person in a conversation. The “freeze-look” cases were
identified for this study in the context of a larger study of otherinitiation of repair (OIR) in LSA and other languages. Subsequent
sections provide the details on how the cases were identified and
coded.

Identification and Coding of Other-initiated Repair
(OIR)
A coding system for OIR was created as part of a major
comparative project of video-recorded corpora in 12 languages,
including LSA (see Dingemanse et al., in press for a detailed
description of the coding schema). The design of the coding
system was based on observations of conversational data, taking
into account extensive prior work on OIR, mainly in spoken
English, and enriched with special attention to cross-linguistic
diversity and multimodal information.
Sequences of other-initiation of repair in LSA were identified
and annotated, using multiple tiers in ELAN to code information
about grammatical, pragmatic and sequential properties of each
case. Independent tiers were created per participant to annotate
grammatical and pragmatic information including independent
tiers for signers’ right and left hands, and for non-manual
markers including: eyebrows (raised, together), eyes (wide
open, squint, closed), eye gaze, wrinkled nose, mouth gestures,
mouthing, head movements, and upper-body movements. Each
example was identified with a unique ID, and the three core
turns of each sequence were distinguished: (1) trouble source
(e.g., A: Have you seen John? = T-1), (2) initiation of repair
(e.g., B: Who? = T0), and (3) solution turn (e.g., A: John.
= T+1), along with an “uptake” or sequence-closing turn if
relevant (e.g., B: Ah, no, I haven’t seen him today. = T+2).
Table 1 shows the distribution and frequency of types of OIR
cases in the collection (Manrique, in press). In LSA, restricted
type repair initiators are nearly twice as frequent as the open
type.

Coding and Transcription of “Freeze-look” Cases
“Freeze-look” cases were coded for numerous features, including
timing aspects and formal aspects. Three measures of timing
of “freeze-look” cases were coded on independent tiers in the
annotation software. These timing measures were as follows:
(a) the length of the entire sequence (T-1, T0, and T+1);
(b) the duration of the “freeze-look” (see Section Timing of
“Freeze-looks” below);
(c) the time between the end of the question (T-1) and the
beginning of the (near) repeat of the question (T+1),
both produced by A (see Section Timing of “Freeze-looks”
below).
Formal coding of the “freeze-look” cases included the
information that we provide in the data examples below,
presented using between a minimum of one line and a maximum
of five lines. Two lines are distinguished for non-manual markers
(NMM), the first one for head movements (e.g., head-down)
and the second one for facial movements (e.g., ET “eyebrows
together”). The line below NMM information (see schema
below) indicates the extension and alignment of NMM (above

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 218

Manrique and Enfield

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

TABLE 1 | Frequency of the types of repair initiators in the LSA corpus (Manrique, in press).
Type
Explicit (on-record)

Subtype
Open

Restricted

Implicit (off-record)

Open

Frequency (n/213)

Proportion (%)

Non-manual4

51

23

Question-word (What?)

13

6

Formulaic

0

0

Content q-word (asking for specification)

15

6

Repetition (asking for confirmation)

56

26

Offer (asking for clarification)

52

24

Alternative question

3

1

“Freeze-look” response

23

10

the line) in relation to manual makers (below the line) that are
often produced in overlap. In general, one line is used for manual
sign glosses (mainly lexical information, illustrated in line 3
below) giving single-word translations into English in capital
letters. In some examples it is also relevant to include more
information to indicate distinctive use of the separate hands.
In these cases, one line is used for the right hand and another
one for the left hand. Mouthing is also used frequently in OIR
practices and it is indicated by a separate line (see line 4) after
the manual glosses when it is relevant. The last line corresponds
to the free English translation in italics. Here is an example,
illustrating the distinct lines for representation of each of the
formal aspects that we coded.

also provided for easier access to the data, including only
the main OIR sequence (T-1, T0, and T+1) in free English
translation.

A large open bracket indicates when overlapping turns are
produced between participants. At the end of line (3), the
timing information of the duration of a sign is indicated
between parentheses in seconds (1.7). In line (4), double
parentheses contain additional comments from the transcriber
(see Supplementary Material for a full description of conventions
used in the examples in this article). Besides the transcription
of the cases described above, a summary of every example is

kind. For example, in a question-answer adjacency pair, the first
pair part (e.g., “What time is it?”) puts the other person in a
position where they are obliged to respond appropriately. The
preferred response to a question is an answer (e.g., “9 o’clock”),
but the normative obligation to deal with the question can also
be handled by a non-answer response that is still relevant to
the question (e.g., “Sorry, I don’t have a watch”). Both answers
and non-answer responses are adequate as second-pair parts to
questions. There are, however, more vague or ambiguous types of
things one might do immediately after a question. For example,
one could stay silent and not move. This could of course be taken
as a complete lack of response, if for example Person B did not

4 They include eyebrow actions (raised and together), wrinkled nose, lips puckered
forward, open-mouth gestures (resembling “Huh?” in spoken language), head
movements (up, down, side, backwards), and leaning forward (Manrique, in press).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Results
Question-answer Sequences
This study focuses on question-answer sequences in unscripted
sign language interaction. Question-answer sequences are one
type of adjacency pair (Schegloff, 1968; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973;
Schegloff, 2007). In an adjacency pair, an initial move by Person
A creates a normative requirement for Person B to produce a
response, where that response is expected to be of a particular

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 219

Manrique and Enfield

realize that Person A was talking to them at all. But it could also
be taken as a specific way for Person B to provide a non-answer
response, not just a failure to respond but a way of signaling that
one is not going to respond. This is the possibility we explore in
subsequent sections.
Before proceeding, we briefly describe how questions are
formed in LSA. Signers in LSA mark questions with nonmanual markers (Veinberg, 1993) as also is often the case in
other sign languages (Baker and Padden, 1978; Baker-Shenk,
1983; Sandler et al., 2011). The use and the timing of nonmanuals are coordinated and linguistically constrained to the
manual sign(s) with which they co-occur (e.g., Baker-Shenk,
1983; Pfau and Quer, 2010). The main non-manual markers
for questions in LSA are eyebrows together for WH-questions
(“What?,” “Who?” etc.) and eyebrows raised for yes/no questions.
These eyebrow positions can be combined with head upward
or downward movements and/or upper body leaning forward.
Another important characteristic of questions in LSA is the
presence of eye gaze directed from the person who asks the
question to the addressee of the question. It occurs during and
after the question has been produced. At the end of the question,
the questioner usually then momentarily suspends or “holds”
at least one of the elements that compose the question. These
can be manual signs (e.g., “What?,” “Who?,” etc.), or non-manual
components such as facial actions that indicate that a question
has been produced.

Fitted Responses to Questions
When Person A asks Person B a question, Person A ideally
expects an answer: this would “fit” best as a response. This
is illustrated in the next example. In Extract 1 Signer A asks
a question about Signer B’s children (line 1) and Signer B
immediately provides a fitted answer in the following turn
(line 2).

Non-fitted Response
There are numerous ways in which someone might produce
a non-fitted response to a question; i.e., something other than
an answer. In this section we discuss three types of non-fitted
response—non-attendance, word search, and on-record repair—
before giving closer attention to a fourth type of non-fitted
response, which is the focus of this study.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

Non-response due to non-attendance
One way of producing something other than a fitted response
is not to respond at all. In sign language this can happen if the
addressee was not looking at the other person when the question
was asked, or if they were interrupted or distracted by someone or
something else when the question was asked. In these cases, there
is an obvious account for why no response is given: it is clear in
the situation that the question was not properly attended to and
could not have been perceived or understood. In this situation,
the questioner needs to secure the addressee’s attention before
redoing the question.
The next example shows numerous strategies to get another
signer’s attention when they are clearly not perceiving what is
being signed to them (cf. Baker, 1977). These include directing
the eye gaze, tapping the addressee and holding the hands up
waiting for the addressee’s attention. In the example given below,
Signer A starts asking B a question (line 1), but at that moment
Signer B is signing and looking at another person, C. Signer A
tries again by holding Signer B’s arm to get her attention, but B
continues signing to C. Then, Signer A maintains the last manual
sign she has produced still while looking at B and waiting for her
attention. In lines 3 and 4, A re-initiates the question when B (line
4) turns her head toward A. However, A has her eyes closed and
looks back to C again. In line 5, A tries again to get B’s attention
by holding B’s arm, B looks at A and A repeats the question
(“Sunset?”) adding the sign “time?” to finish the question “What
time is the sunset (there)?” This refers to the sunset in a different
region in Argentina (Perito Moreno Glacier in the South). In line
8, B answers A’s question after several attempts from A. In this
example it is clear that the lack of response from B to A’s initial
attempts to ask her question is due to non-attendance and failure
to perceive what was being signed.
Extract 3 shows a similar example in a dyadic interaction
between two friends. Although one of the participants (B) is
signing to A in this example, he is not maintaining eye contact
all the time, but shifting eye gaze, closing his eyes, looking
at his hands while occasionally monitoring his addressee. In
line 1, when Signer A asks Signer B a question, Signer B is
not looking at A. Then, Signer A maintains both hands in
signing position, pointing at Signer B (“PRO2”), waiting for his
attention. In line 3, once B opens his eyes and looks at A, then
A repeats the question. B recognizes A is asking a question,
drops his last sign and answers A (“NO, I haven’t sent it to
the office”), followed by a clarification, “I sent it, but I haven’t
read it.”
Visual contact and feedback play different roles in signed
and spoken language conversation (see Baker, 1977). Constant
visual feedback and mutual monitoring between parties in
sign language conversation is indispensible to successful
communication. Signers generally maintain more focused
interactions and minimize multi-tasking activities that
would divert visual attention from the interaction. Signers
provide constant feedback and monitoring using manual
and nonmanual attention-getting strategies (Baker, 1977).
More research is needed to determine how different signed
and spoken language everyday conversation are in this
regard.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 220

Manrique and Enfield

Non-fitted response with signs of “word search”
A second way of giving a non-fitted response to a question is
to give an explicit signal that the response is delayed due to
inability to find the words one is looking for in formulating an
answer. Word-searching displays are common type of non-fitted
response in everyday interaction. They indicate that the addressee
is working on the answer and that the answer is delayed. Speakers
use different vocal and gestural strategies to indicate they are
working on the answer such as: cutoffs, fillers (“um,” “uh,” etc.)
(Levelt, 1983; Clark and Fox Tree, 2002), and break of eye contact
(often then looking upwards) (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1986).
Signers use similar gestural visual strategies to indicate problems
in delivering or remembering a specific reference, including
shifting eye gaze, closing eyes, “thinking” gestures, or rubbing
fingers.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

Extract 4 shows multiple word searching strategies by both
participants after a question is asked. These are: breaking eye
contact, squinted eyes (line 4); giving an ad-hoc description
instead of name (“short hair”), holding hand/s up, and closing
eyes (line 5) when trying to retrieve a name using fingerspelling
(line 8).
In examples like this one, a signer’s observable “thinking”
behavior is a way of overtly accounting for the failure to provide
an answer to a question. As it also indicates that the signer has
indeed understood the question, it does not elicit a repetition of
the question.

Non-fitted response: on-record repair
A type of non-fitted response that is always possible is an explicit,
on-record other-initiation of repair (Schegloff et al., 1977;

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 221

Manrique and Enfield

Schegloff, 1982; Hayashi et al., 2013; Dingemanse and Enfield,
2015). If one has not heard or understood a question, it is
always possible to ask for repetition or clarification of the
question rather than attempt to answer it. Other-initiation of
repair is a way of dealing with online problems of hearing and
understanding during interaction so as to maintain and secure
mutual understanding, alignment, and affiliation. It is, however,
dispreferred, as it halts the progress of talk during a conversation,
derailing it momentarily (Stivers and Robinson, 2006).
Extract 5 shows an explicit initiation of a repair sequence after
a question as illustrated in Figure 1 by Signer B. It is done using
an “open” format (“What?”) in line 2. There is also a “restricted”
type of repair initiation (“Inside?”) by Signer A, in line 5.
In this example, Signer B displays an explicit initiation of
repair using both manual signs (WH-question word “WHAT”)
and nonmanuals (eyebrows together and leaning forward).
Signer B holds these until Signer A solves the problem by nearrepeating the trouble source (i.e., the question). In the solution
turn, Signer B makes the implicit question more explicit, and
more specific (by clarifying the person referent, “Your son, theoldest”). Another initiation of repair in this example is done
using a restricted format (line 5; for the terminology “restricted”
vs. “open,” see Section Introduction, above, and Dingemanse
and Enfield, 2015). It is produced with a combination of
manual markers (the hand sign for “INSIDE”) and nonmanual
markers of yes/no questioning (raised eyebrows and head moving
downwards).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

Freeze-look: A Notable Absence of
Response
We now turn to the type of non-fitted response that we refer
to as a freeze-look. We argue that this type of response is a
non-official or off-record way of initiating repair. In a collection
of cases of other-initiated repair in LSA (Manrique, in press),
the “freeze-look” practice makes up around 10% of all cases.
The “freeze-look,” which effectively prompts a questioner to redo their question, is performed by an addressee by holding
their hands and body in position and looking directly at the
questioner at a time when it is expected that they should be
now responding to the question. This suspended or frozen body
posture is maintained until the signer of the trouble source redoes
the question (e.g., by repeating or rephrasing), or until the person
producing the “freeze-look” upgrades by initiating an on-record
other-initiation of repair (see below).
The definitive characteristics of the “freeze-look” are the
following:
(a) At the relevant moment, the addressee of a question (Signer
B) is normatively required to produce a relevant response (an
answer to a question, or something related).
(b) The addressee looks directly at the Signer of the question
(Signer A).
(c) The addressee temporarily holds their entire body posture in
a still or “frozen” position.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 222

Manrique and Enfield

5 ASO is a deaf association

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

in Buenos Aires.

6 NSP: non-signing position.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 223

Manrique and Enfield

(d) It is clear that the addressee has seen that they were just
addressed by A; and they are not otherwise signaling any
difficulty in responding.
(e) Signer A then redoes the question (e.g., by repeating or
rephrasing).

FIGURE 1 | “What?,” Signer B, on the right, initiates an open type of
repair on A’s prior turn in line 2, producing a manual sign for WH-q
word (“WHAT”) and nonmanual components (bringing her eyebrows
together and leaning forward).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

(See diagram in Figure 2 for a representation of the “freeze-look”
response sequence).
We argue that the “freeze-look” is an implicit or off-record
practice for initiating repair. Other ways of initiating repair
such as asking “What?” are on-record because they use symbolic
means to explicitly state that there is a problem of perception
or understanding and that this problem now needs to be fixed;
the speaker is “officially” committing to their intention to

FIGURE 2 | The typical “freeze-look” response sequence, including the
question produced by A, as trouble source and first pair part (FPP), the
“freeze-look” as a noticeable absence of response turn and the (near)
repeat of the question as solution turn provided by the person who
earlier produced the trouble source.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 224

Manrique and Enfield

momentarily suspend the progress of the interaction, in spite
of possible negative or “face-threatening” effects of this (Brown
and Levinson, 1987). By contrast, the “freeze-look” is off-record
because it does not explicitly encode the intention to initiate
repair, just as “It’s cold in here” does not explicitly encode the
intention to get somebody to shut the window. Nevertheless, as
we argue below, the “freeze-look” is highly effective as an otherinitiator of repair, but it still technically leaves the interpretation
open, thus making a display of giving the recipient some freedom
to decide how to interpret the utterance (Sifianou, 1999).
We now present examples of the “freeze-look” phenomenon.
In Extract 6, Extract 7, Extract 8, and Extract 9, Signer B produces
a “freeze-look” after Signer A has asked them a question. Signer
B suspends her/his signing body posture, maintaining it still

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

from the beginning of Signer A’s question until near the end of
the re-doing of the question as depicted in Figure 3. The key
point we wish to make here is that in all these cases Signer A
treats B’s “freeze-look” behavior in the same way as they would
treat an explicit open format of other-initiation of repair, namely
by immediately re-doing the question (with or without some
adjustment). In all these cases, once the question is re-done, B
can then produce a fitted response.
In Extract 6, Signer A responds to Signer B’s “freezelook” with a slightly modified repetition of their question,
changing the order of the utterance followed by holding his
palms up at the end “eh?,” and adding more information by
specifying a place name (“Santa-Fe,” a province in Argentina) (see
Figure 4).

FIGURE 3 | “Hey, I was wondering, has (sign-name) moved?,” Signer A, sitting on the right, asks a question to Signer B, sitting on the left (line1). Signer
B produces a “freeze-look” response instead of a fitted answer (line 2) that last for 1.6 s.
FIGURE 4 | “I was wondering, has {sign-name} moved to Santa Fe?,” Signer A, repeats the question (line 3) produced in line 1 by modifying the order
of the utterance and adding more information by specifying a place name.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 225

Manrique and Enfield

In Extract 7, Signer B produces a “freeze-look” response to A’s
question, holding still both manual and nonmanual signs for 1.6 s
from the beginning of the question until the end of the re-doing
of the question represented in Figures 5, 6. Signer A responds to
Signer B’s “freeze-look” in the same way they would respond to an
on-record OIR strategy, namely by immediately offering a repeat
of the question.
In Extract 8, two friends are chatting about vacations in the
Perito Moreno Glacier in the South of Argentina. Signer A has

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

vacationed there and Signer B is planning to visit. There is a
seeing problem produced by an overlap: both participants are
signing at the same time. B’s “freeze-look” occurs when Signer A
asks the question again: Signer B stops signing, maintaining her
nonmanual configuration illustrated in Figure 7. The eventual
response from Signer A is a re-doing of the question in line 6:
a partial repetition, with a change in the order of signs in the
utterance shown in Figure 8. Signer B then produces a fitted
answer (in line 7) as the repeated question is coming to an end.

FIGURE 5 | “{Has} he taken {something from} you?,” Signer A, sitting on the right, asks B a question (line 1). Then, Signer B, sitting on the left, displays a
“freeze-look” response for 1.6 s (line 2).
FIGURE 6 | “{Has} he taken {something from} you?,” Signer A, sitting on the right, repeats the question to B (line 3). In parallel, Signer B, sitting on the left,
continues with the same “freeze-look” until Signer A finishes the repetition of the question (line 3) and then answers the question.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 226

Manrique and Enfield

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

FIGURE 7 | “Haven’t I showed you the pictures?,” Signer A asks a question to Signer B, sitting on the right. Signer B suspends her body position
producing a “freeze-look.”
FIGURE 8 | “The pictures, have I showed you them?,” Signer A, sitting on the left, repeats the question and Signer B continues maintaining the
“freeze-look” until toward the end of the repetition of the question, when she provides a fitted answer to A.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 227

Manrique and Enfield

Extract 9 shows a similar case, beginning with an attentional
problem: Signer B is not looking at Signer A, and Signer A has to
secure B’s attention in order to proceed. Once Signer B’s visual
attention is on Signer A, Signer A then asks B about another
person using a sign name (SN), in line 3. From the beginning of
A’s question in Line 3, Signer B produces a “freeze-look,” looking
directly at Signer A and holding still his signing position. Then in
Line 5, Signer A repeats the sign name of the person he has asked
about. Note that in this case, B’s “freeze-look” is held for some
time after the end of Signer A’s repeated question, and is released
only when Signer B begins providing a fitted response.
The sequences in Extract 8 and Extract 9 illustrate the kinds of
seeing problems that are common in sign language interaction,
and they show that these problems can occur in the run-up
to a “freeze-look” sequence. The two examples have a similar
structure: Person A asks Person B a question, but B is not
attending and fails to respond; Person A then secures B’s attention
before repeating the question; Person B produces a “freeze-look”
response; and finally Person A repeats the question and a fitted
answer can be given, thus closing the sequence and allowing
the conversation to move forward. These cases help us see a
distinction between non-response due to absence of attention
(not seeing that one had been asked a question at all) and the
open signal of non-response that we term the “freeze-look.” The
key difference is revealed in how the non-response is treated
by person A. If the non-response is simply due to B’s lack of

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

attention, then A will then secure the required attention in
some way. If the non-response is in the form of a “freeze-look”
from B, then B will repeat the question. Because B is looking
directly at A when they produce a “freeze-look,” then the problem
cannot be one of attention or perception; instead, because B is
studiously not responding, the implication is that they cannot
respond, and this will most likely be because they have not clearly
comprehended what was just asked. The simple solution is for
Signer A to repeat the question: precisely the response that they
would have produced had Signer B asked “What did you say?.”

Pursuit Cases: From Implicit to Explicit OIR
If we are correct in claiming that the “freeze-look” is an offrecord way to do other initiation of repair, this implies that it is
at the “weak” end of the scale of repair strategies (Schegloff et al.,
1977, p. 369). This would lead to the following prediction: If a
“freeze-look” response to a question does not elicit a repetition
or clarification of that question, the person who produced the
“freeze-look” can then upgrade to a more explicit or on-record
initiation of repair. This prediction is borne out in the LSA
corpus. Almost 50% of the “freeze-look” action cases (11 out of
23) are upgraded to an explicit on-record OIR (while the opposite
ordering is not observed). In most of the observed cases, a
“freeze-look” is upgraded to an open format of other-initiation of
repair (such as What?), but it may also be upgraded to a restricted
format (such as Who? Where?). We now look at some examples.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 228

Manrique and Enfield

In Extract 10 Signer B’s first response (in Line 2) is a
“freeze-look,” but the second version of the question produced
by Signer A in response (in Line 3) does not appear to be
adequate. Rather than giving an answer to the question, Signer
B instead upgrades to an explicit way of initiating repair (i.e.,
a head tilt that can be translated as “Huh?”). The problem is
eventually solved, with Signer B able to answer the question in
line 6.
In Extract 11, Signers A and B are chatting about B’s son,
who is working on a cruise. Signer A asks B if there are
many tourists traveling on the cruise (line 1). After a “freezelook” from Signer B, A repeats the question, with changes
to the word order. At this point, rather than answering the
question, in line 4 Signer B initiates repair more explicitly,
with a sign that combines puckering of the lips and leaning
forward of the head (also roughly translatable as “Huh?”),
along with mouthing of the Spanish word Como?. Finally, in
line 5, Signer A solves the sequence by partially repeating
the question “Tourism?,” adding mouthing to the partial
repetition.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

In Extract 12, Signer A asks a question using only mouthing
(in line 1), in response to which Signer B produces a “freezelook” response as shown in Figure 9. Signer A does a repeat of
the question, again using mouthing. Signer B’s response is now a
more explicit type of OIR using several NMMs. He produces an
open-mouth gesture (resembling the interjection “huh?”), raises
his eyebrows and moves his head upwards (see Figure 10), while
holding the manual signs produced in the previous turn (se)
to explicitly initiate repair. Then, Signer A uses fingerspelling
to solve the problem in line 5. Mouthing is a common cause
of understanding problems in LSA that is often fixed by using
fingerspelling instead (Manrique, in press).

Timing of “Freeze-looks”
Our study focuses on the function of the “freeze-look” in a
specific context (immediately after a question) and identifies
a specific function in that context (it elicits a “repair” of the
question in the form of a repeat or near-repeat). In addition
to measuring the effects of the “freeze-look” by examining the
responses it elicits, we also measured aspects of the “freeze-look’s”

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 229

Manrique and Enfield

timing. A first measure to note here is the response latency, i.e.,
the time between the end of the trouble source by Person A (with
B producing a “freeze-look”) and the beginning of their “repair”
or (near-) repeat of the original question. See Figure 11.
This shows that the “freeze-look” has a rapid effect in
interaction: when a person finishes their question and finds that
they are faced by their addressee (still) producing a “freeze-look,”
then they will quickly follow up with a repeat or near-repeat of
the question.
A second timing measure to note is the absolute duration
of “freeze-look” behaviors. In our LSA data, there is a range in

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

duration from 0.3 to 6.3 s, with 69 percent between 0.5 and 3 s.
See Figure 12.
This suggests that “freeze-looks” can continue well past the
onset of the “repair” that they elicit, in T+1. This is indeed the
case: They tend to be “released” not at the moment at which
the subsequent repair turn begins, but rather at the moment
at which Person B is ready to produce their next utterance.
This will either be when Person B upgrades to a “stronger”
OIR because the repair was inadequate for some reason (which
happens about 50% of the time), or it will be when Person B
produces an “uptake” or similar turn that signals subsequent

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 230

Manrique and Enfield

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

FIGURE 9 | ((“Company’s name”)), Signer A, the woman sitting on the left side of the table, asks a question to Signer B, the man in the white t-shirt
sitting on the right side of the table. At the end of the question, Signer B produces a “freeze-look” (lines 1 and 2) for 2.3 s.
FIGURE 10 | “Huh?,” Signer B, after Signer A repeats the question, initiates a more explicit type of OIR using several NMMs. He produces an
open-mouth gesture (resembling “huh?”), raises his eyebrows and moves his head upwards, while holding the manual signs produced in the previous turn (see
Figure 8) to explicitly initiate repair.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 231

Manrique and Enfield

FIGURE 11 | Response latencies from onset of B’s “freeze-look” to
beginning of A’s repair turn.

repair turn was a satisfactorily resolution of the problem (see
Floyd et al., 2014 for description of this timing pattern in a threelanguage comparison, involving LSA and two spoken languages;
the form of the “freeze-look” and “hold” in spoken languages is
similar to sign language, as it involves the same manual and facial
articulators, being used for co-speech gesture).

Conclusion
The evidence we have presented from LSA shows that the “freezelook” behavior—the act of keeping the whole body in a still
position while looking directly at the person who has just asked
a question—functions as an open-class other-initiator of repair
(OIR), and additionally that it is “off-record” and somewhat
weak in nature. Our claim that a “freeze-look” is a kind of
OIR is supported by the fact that it gives rise to the same
functional outcome as other known types of OIR: namely, it
leads to a “re-doing” of the first utterance (e.g., a repeat or
a reformulation). Figure 13 summarizes the possible patterns
of response and counter-response after a question that have
been reviewed in this study, showing explicitly the functional
identity or similarity of the “freeze-look” and other available OIR
strategies.
Our claim that the “freeze-look” is an off-record strategy
of OIR is firstly based on its intrinsic semiotic properties: it
does not use symbolic resources (i.e., conventional signs such as
lexical items that have semantic entailments) to explicitly encode
that there is a problem of understanding; instead, it uses nonsymbolic resources (i.e., indexical signals of the kind that occur
in animal communication; on these semiotic distinctions see
Enfield, 2013: Chapter 4). Secondly, its status as off-record is
consistent with the fact that it appears to be “weaker” than other
available OIR options (just as an indirect request is “weaker”

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

FIGURE 12 | “Freeze-look” durations in LSA data set.

than a direct request). One sense in which it is weak is that it
only seems to succeed half of the time it is used: in 50% percent
of cases, a “freeze-look” is followed up by a stronger otherinitiation or repair. The common upgrading of a “freeze-look”
to an explicit OIR (such as “What?”) shows that it occupies a
position in a “paradigm” of alternative types of OIR. This was
shown in the cases presented in Section Freeze-look: A Notable
Absence of Response, above. In each of those cases, Signer B
initially produces a “freeze-look” response to Signer A’s question,
leading to a re-doing of that question; however, the solution
appears to be inadequate, and Signer B then upgrades with a
stronger, on-record open OIR, indicating that Signer A’s first redoing of the question did not solve the problem. This ordering of
Person B’s chosen strategies for OIR in these sequences provides
evidence in favor of the argument that the “freeze-look” is a weak
type, which sometimes needs to be upgraded or strengthened. We
propose that this can be captured by placing the “freeze-look” at
the extreme “weak” end of a continuum of types of conversational
repair (from cf. Schegloff et al., 1977; Sidnell, 2010). Schegloff
et al. (1977) rank the OIR formats in in terms of their “strength”
in identifying the trouble source of the OIR sequence. “Openclass” repair initiators (Drew, 1997) have been placed on the
“weakest” end, as they leave open the identification of the trouble
source; often, the entire previous turn needs to be re-done by
the signer/speaker of the trouble source. On the “strongest”
end of the continuum are “understanding-check” formats such
as repetition of part or all of a previous turn that invite
confirmation that what one just heard or understood was correct.
Our proposal for expansion of the continuum is illustrated in
Figure 14.
We do not want to imply that the off-record OIR function
is the only function of the general behavior of holding the
body still while looking at one’s interlocutor. The findings of
our study apply exclusively to the function of this practice

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 232

Manrique and Enfield

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

FIGURE 13 | Possible patterns of response and counter-response after a question, showing functional similarities between “freeze-look” and
on-record OIR strategies.

FIGURE 14 | Types of other initiation of repair laid out on a continuum from “weak” to “strong” (after Schegloff et al., 1977; Sidnell, 2010) with the
“freeze-look” behavior placed at the extreme “weak” end of types of conversational repair.

in a specific position in a conversational sequence: i.e., just
after a person has been asked a question. Further research is
needed to investigate other functions that this behavior may
have in other defined types of context, both in LSA, and
cross-linguistically.
Finally, our data have come from a sign language, and so one
might ask: Is this practice exclusive to sign language? It may not
be surprising that we have noticed the “freeze-look” phenomenon
in sign language conversation, given that visual behavior is
obviously the exclusive focus of attention in this type of language.
But users of spoken languages also have a rich set of visual
resources at their disposal (McNeill, 1992; Kendon, 2004; GoldinMeadow, 2005; Enfield, 2009). The “freeze-look” behavior can
in principle be produced by anybody in a face-to-face setting,
and so we may ask whether it is also used for other-initiation
of repair in spoken languages. Only further research will tell,
but we see no reason to think it would not be used in this
way universally. At least this is a hypothesis to be tested. If
the “freeze-look” turns out to be systematically used in spoken
language interaction as well, then this study will have made
a contribution not only to research on sign languages and on
practices for other-initiation of repair in conversation, but it will
have taken insights from research on sign language as pointers
to an underexplored realm of possibility in spoken language: the
systematic use of visible bodily behavior as part of the system of
language.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Acknowledgments
This research was conducted as part of the European Research
Council project Human Sociality and Systems of Language
of Use (European Research Council Starting Grant 240853
HSSLU), directed by Nick Enfield and hosted by the Max
Planck Society. We thank all the participants in The Argentine
Sign Language (LSA) Conversational Corpus in LSA (20102014) and the Association de Sordomudos de Ayuda Mutua
(ASAM); Asociación Argentina para Sordomudas, Casa Hogar;
Confederación Argentina de Sordos (CAS); Asociación Argentina
de Sordos (ASO); and CRESCOMAS San Juan, Argentina.
We would especially like to thank Tony Druetta, as well as
Juancito and Marita Druetta, Pablo Lemmo, Cecilia Maltez,
Diego Morales, and Graciela Ruoti. We gratefully acknowledge
the support of the Language and Cognition Department of the
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, directed
by Steve Levinson, for providing an excellent institutional and
intellectual environment. We are grateful to all participants in
the Other-Initiated Repair research project at the MPI Nijmegen
for comments and feedback: Julija Baranova, Joe Blythe, Penny
Brown, Mark Dingemanse, Paul Drew, Tyko Dirksmeyer, Simeon
Floyd, Rosa Gisladottir, Kobin Kendrick, Stephen Levinson, and
Giovanni Rossi. For comments and feedback we also thank Onno
Crasborn, Herb Clark, John Heritage, Galina Bolden, Adam
Kendon, and Trevor Johnston. We would also like to express

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 233

Manrique and Enfield

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

our gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for providing critical
comments on an earlier version of this manuscript and greatly
helping to improve it. Finally, we would like to thank Mart
Lubbers, Francisco Torreira, and Michael Wiemers for technical
support with Python and R.

Supplementary Material

References

Floyd, S., Manrique, E., Rossi, G., and Torreira, F. (2014). The timing
of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: evidence from
three languages. Dis. Proces. 52, 1–30. doi: 10.1080/0163853x.2014.
992680
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goodwin, C., and Goodwin, M. H. (1986). Gesture and coparticipation in the
activity of searching for a word. Semiotica 62, 51–75.
Hayashi, M., Raymond, G., and Sidnell, J. (eds.). (2013). Conversational Repair and
Human Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jefferson, G. (2004). “Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction,” in
Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing), 13–34.
Jefferson, G. (2015). Talking About Troubles in Conversation. New York, NY;
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnston, T. (2010). From archive to corpus: transcription and annotation in the
creation of signed language corpora. Intern. J. Corpus Linguist. 15, 106–31. doi:
10.1075/ijcl.15.1.05joh
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Klima, E. S., and Bellugi, U. (1979). The Signs of Language. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1983). Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cognition 14, 41–104.
doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(83)90026-4
Levinson, S. C., and Torreira, F. (2015). Timing in turn-taking and its
implications for processing models of language. Front. Psychol. 6:731. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00731
Liddell, S. K. (2003). Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Manrique, E. (2011). Other-Repair Initiators in Argentinean Sign Language:
Handling Seeing and Understanding Difficulties in Face-to-face Interaction.
Nijmegen: Radboud Universiteit.
Manrique, E. (in press). Other-initiated repair in argentine sign language. Open
Linguist.
Massone, M. I. (1993). Lengua de Señas Argentina: Diccionario Bilingue = Argentine
Sign Language: Bilingual Dictionary, Vol. 1–2. Buenos Aires: Sopena.
Massone, M. I., and Curiel, M. (1993). Categorías gramaticales en la lengua de señas
argentina. Rev. Lingüíst. Teóric. Apl. 31, 27–54.
Massone, M. I., and Machado, E. M. (1992). Lengua de Señas Argentina: Análisis y
Vocabulario Bilingüe. Buenos Aires: Edicial.
McCleary, L., and Leite, T. de A. (2013). Turn-taking in Brazilian sign
language: evidence from overlap. J. Interact. Res. Commun. Disord. 4:123. doi:
10.1558/jircd.v4i1.123
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mesch, J. (2001). Tactile Sign Language: Turn Taking and Question in Signed
Conversations of Deaf-Blind People. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University
Press.
Pfau, R., and Quer, J. (2010). “Nonmanuals: their grammatical and prosodic roles,”
in Sign Languages, ed D. Brentari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
381–402.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735.
Sandler, W., Meir, I., Dachkovsky, S., Padden, C., and Aronoff, M. (2011). The
emergence of complexity in prosody and syntax. Lingua 121, 2014–2033. doi:
10.1016/j.lingua.2011.05.007
Sandler, W., and Lillo-Martin, D. (2006). Sign Language and Linguistic Universals.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Baker, C. (1977). “Regulators and turn-taking in American Sign Language
discourse,” in On the Other Hand: New Perspectives on American
Sign Language, ed L. Friedman (New York, NY: Academic Press),
215–236.
Baker, C., and Padden, C. (1978). “Focusing on the nonmanual components of
American Sign Language,” in Understanding Language Through Sign Language
Research, ed P. Siple (New York, NY: Academic Press), 27–57.
Baker-Shenk, C. L. (1983). A Microanalysis of the Nonmanual Components of
Questions in American Sign Language. Doctoral dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley.
Behares, L., Massone, M., and Curiel, M. (1990). El Discurso Pedagógico de la
Educación del Sordo. Construcciones de Saber y Relaciones de Poder. Buenos
Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras; Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Boyes-Braem, P., Sutton-Spence, R., and te Leiden, R. (eds.). (2001). The Hands Are
the Head of the Mouth: The Mouth as Articulator in Sign Languages. Hanburg:
Signum Press.
Brown, P., and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language
Usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Vol. 4. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Clark, H. H., and Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Using uh and um in
spontaneous speaking. Cognition 84, 73–111. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(02)
00017-3
Curiel, M., and Massone, M. I. (2004). Sign order in argentine sign language. Sign
Lang. Stud. 5, 63–93. doi: 10.1353/sls.2004.0023
de Vos, C., Torreira, F., and Levinson, S. C. (2015). Turn-timing in signed
conversations: coordinating stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries. Front. Psychol.
6:268. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00268
Dingemanse, M., and Enfield, N. J. (2015). Other-initiated repair across languages:
towards a typology of conversational structures. Open Linguist. 1, 98–118. doi:
10.2478/opli-2014-0007
Dingemanse, M., Kendrick, K., and Enfield, N. J. (in press). A coding scheme for
other-initiated repair across languages. Open Linguist.
Dingemanse, M., Roberts, S., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Drew, P., Floyd, S., et al. (in
press). Universal principles in the repair of communication problems. PLoS
ONE.
Dingemanse, M., Torreira, F., and Enfield, N. J. (2013). Is “Huh?” a Universal
Word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic
items. PLoS ONE 8:e78273. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078273
Dively, V. L. (1998). “Conversational repair in ASL,” in Pinky Extension and Eye
Gaze: Language Use in Deaf Communities, ed C. Lucas (Washington, DC:
Gallaudet University Press), 137–169.
Drew, P. (1997). “Open” class repair initiators in response to sequential sources
of troubles in conversation. J. Pragmat. 28, 69–101. doi: 10.1016/S03782166(97)89759-7
Emmorey, K. (2001). Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights From Sign
Language Research. Mahwah, NJ: Psychology Press.
Enfield, N. J. (2009). The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite
Utterances, Vol. 8. Edited by S. C. Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Enfield, N. J. (2013). Relationship Thinking: Agency, Enchrony, and Human
Sociality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Enfield, N. J., Dingemanse, M., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Brown, P., Dirksmeyer, T.,
et al. (2013). “Huh? What?—A first survey in 21 languages,” in Conversational
Repair and Human Understanding, eds M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, and J. Sidnell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 343–380.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found
online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.
2015.01326

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 234

Manrique and Enfield

Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. Am. Anthropol. 70,
1075–1095. doi: 10.1525/aa.1968.70.6.02a00030
Schegloff, E. A. (1982). “Discourse as an interactional achievement: some uses
of “Uh Huh” and other things that come between sentences,” in Analyzing
Discourse: Text and Talk, ed D. Tannen (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press), 71–93.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in
Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., and Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for selfcorrection in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53, 361–382.
doi: 10.1353/lan.1977.0041
Schegloff, E. A., and Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 8, 289–327.
doi: 10.1515/semi.1973.8.4.289
Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation Analysis: An Introduction. London: WileyBlackwell.
Sifianou, M. (1999). Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-Cultural
Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Stivers, T., and Robinson, J. D. (2006). A preference for progressivity in interaction.
Lang. Soc. 35, 367–392. doi: 10.1017/S0047404506060179
Sutton-Spence, R., and Woll, B. (1999). The Linguistics of British Sign Language: An
Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Valassina, S. (ed.). (1997). Diccionario Lengua de Señas Argentina—Español.
Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Culture y Educación de la Nación.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Suspending next turn as repair initiation

Veinberg, S. (1993). La función linguística de los rasgos no-manuales en la
aseveración, la negación y la interrogación en la Lengua de Señas Argentina.
Signo Seña 2, 101.
Veinberg, S. (1996). Argentinien: Anfänge und Entwicklung der Erziehung
Gehörloser (Argentina: Inicios y desarrollo de la educación del sordo).
Das Zeichen. Zeitschrift Zum Thema Gebärdensprache Und Kommunikation
Gehörlose 38, 488–496.
Vermeerbergen, M., Leeson, L., and Crasborn, O. A. (2007). Simultaneity in Signed
Languages: Form and Function. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Willoughby, L., Manns, H., Shimako, I., and Bartlett, M. (2014). Misunderstanding
and repair in tactile auslan. Sign Lang. Stud. 14, 419–443. doi:
10.1353/sls.2014.0014
Wittenburg, P., et al. (2006). “Elan: a professional framework for multimodality
research,” in Proceedings of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
(LREC). Available online at: http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Manrique and Enfield. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use,
distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal
is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1326 | 235

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 04 September 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01167

Early development of turn-taking in
vocal interaction between mothers
and infants
Maya Gratier1* , Emmanuel Devouche2 , Bahia Guellai1 , Rubia Infanti1,3 , Ebru Yilmaz1 and
Erika Parlato-Oliveira3
1
Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Paris, France, 2 Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France, 3 Universidade
Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Edited by:
Marisa Casillas,
Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Elma Hilbrink,
Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Ann Bigelow,
St. Francis Xavier University, Canada
*Correspondence:
Maya Gratier,
Laboratoire Ethology, Cognition,
Développement (BSL114), Université
Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense,
200 Avenue de la République, 92001
Nanterre, Paris, France
gratier@gmail.com
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 06 February 2015
Accepted: 24 July 2015
Published: 04 September 2015
Citation:
Gratier M, Devouche E, Guellai B,
Infanti R, Yilmaz E
and Parlato-Oliveira E (2015) Early
development of turn-taking in vocal
interaction between mothers
and infants. Front. Psychol. 6:1167.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01167

Infants are known to engage in conversation-like exchanges from the end of the second
month after birth. These ‘protoconversations’ involve both turn-taking and overlapping
vocalization. Previous research has shown that the temporal organization of adult–infant
turn-taking sequences is similar to that of adult verbal conversation. It has also been
shown that young infants adjust the quality of their vocalization in response to the quality
and timing of adult vocalization. We present new evidence of turn-taking interaction
in infants aged between 8 and 21 weeks based on the analysis of 176 samples of
naturalistic face-to-face interactions from 51 dyads. We found high levels of latched
turns as well as frequent initiation of turn-taking by infants at these ages. Our data do
not support the hypothesis that turn-taking ability increases with age between 2 and
5 months but do suggest that infants are active participants in turn-taking from the
earliest age and that mothers adjust turn-taking formats to infants.
Keywords: early mother–infant communication, turn-taking, protoconversation, vocal development

Introduction
Conversation is a complex communicative process in which visual and auditory signals are
combined in a flow of turn taking. An important aspect of the temporal organization of
conversation is the fluency between turns. The end of a speaker’s turn needs to be anticipated by the
next speaker for the conversation to be fluent (Sacks et al., 1974). In everyday conversation, people
are remarkably rapid and accurate in switching between listener and speaker roles (Magyari and De
Ruiter, 2012). The gap between turns in conversation between native speakers of the same language
is generally around 250 ms (De Ruiter et al., 2006; Stivers et al., 2009). Speakers predict not only
when a turn will end but also the content of the turn, enabling them to respond in a well-timed and
semantically appropriate manner. Computational cognitive models fail to account for the rapidity
and efficiency of transitions between speakers because they have ignored the role of embodiment in
predicting speaker turns (Goodwin, 1986). Experimental studies suggest that speakers rely on both
lexico-syntactic information and pragmatic signals to project the end of a turn but that accurate
predictions are not possible without lexical content (De Ruiter et al., 2006).
Yet a number of studies in psychology describe turn-taking interaction occurring between
infants and adults as early as in the second month of life, long before any access to lexical
information. A recent study conducted by Caskey et al. (2011) on premature infants showed that as
Abbreviations: CI, confidence interval; IM, infant–mother; MI, mother–infant; OR, odds ratio; TTS, turn-taking sequence.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 236

Gratier et al.

early as 32–36 weeks gestational age the frequency of infant
vocalization increases in the presence of a parent. Preterm infants
were also found to produce reciprocal vocalizations, supporting
the hypothesis that turn-taking is a precocious human ability
(Caskey et al., 2011). Stivers et al. (2009) have shown the powerful
cross-cultural stability of two basic rules of the turn-taking
system, avoiding overlap and minimizing silence between turns.
Do young infants already know these rules or do they learn
them in the course of interacting with partners? Few studies offer
a developmental account of turn-taking interaction in young
infants, prior to language ability.
In the first weeks after birth, infants begin to produce
vocalizations that are described in the literature as coos and
murmurs (Oller, 2000) and that elicit emotional and motivated
responses from social partners. These vocalizations are not
readily associated with either positive or negative emotion, in
the way that laughter or crying are (Oller et al., 2013). They are
produced when infants are alert and relaxed or playful. They
are frequently associated with an intent knit-brow gaze directed
at the social partner and with mouth movements resembling
those of speech that have been called pre-speech movements
(Trevarthen, 1993). Both caregivers and naive observers interpret
these vocalizations as being produced intentionally, wilfully and
with effort (Bloom and Lo, 1990; Beaumont and Bloom, 1993).
The appearance of these kinds of vocalizations gives rise to
vocal exchanges with adult partners that resemble conversations
because they are characterized by alternating vocalizations
separated by audible pauses (Bateson, 1975; Stern et al., 1975;
Trevarthen, 1979; Bloom, 1988). Adults respond to the coos and
murmurs of young infants with specific prosody and timing.
They have been shown to closely match the acoustic qualities of
infant vocalizations, producing short repetitive bouts of infantdirected speech aimed at eliciting further vocalization on the
part of the infant (Papoušek and Papoušek, 1989; Gratier and
Devouche, 2011). Mothers also modulate their pitch according
to the perceived emotional expressions of infants (Smith and
Trainor, 2008). It has also been demonstrated that infants in turn
adjust the quality of their vocalization in response to adults. The
kinds of vocalizations involved in vocal turn-taking with an adult
have been described as having a ‘speech-like’ quality compared
with vocalizations produced alone or outside of a turn-taking
format (Bloom et al., 1987). Vocal interaction in the first months
of life thus appears to be bidirectional and mutually regulated
(Lavelli and Fogel, 2013).
Various approaches have been used to demonstrate the active
role of both mothers and infants in the first half year of life
in face-to-face interaction. A durational approach reveals stable
timing structures in maternal behavior across vocal and kinesic
modalities (Stern et al., 1977; Cossette et al., 1986). Mothers’
speech to young infants is timed in such a way as to leave room for
infant response. Maternal utterances are brief (between 0.5 and
1.5 s) and followed by pauses of around 1 s, usually followed by
another utterance. Pauses between utterances that are connected
through repetition of form, content, or topic rarely exceed 3 s and
pauses longer than 3 s generally demarcate episodes of mutual
engagement (Stern et al., 1977; Stern and Gibbon, 1979). With
infants aged between 2 and 4 months, the majority of maternal

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Early development of turn-taking

responses to infants occur with a 1 s latency after the signal (Keller
et al., 1999) and vocalization is responded to more frequently
than gaze and smiling (Van Egeren et al., 2001). Pauses between
alternating vocal turns of young infants and mothers have been
found to range from 500 ms to 1 s (Jaffe et al., 2001).
A related approach to studying protoconversational
organization focuses on the match or cross-correlation between
temporal patterns of maternal and infant vocalization in
spontaneous face-to-face interaction. The fact that mothers
and infants engaged in social interaction match each other for
vocalization and pause duration suggests a mutual regulation of
the turn-taking exchange (Beebe et al., 1985; Jaffe et al., 2001). In
her pioneering study of the protoconversations of a single infant
aged between 6 and 13 weeks, Bateson (1975) highlighted the
bidirectionality of infant and mother vocalization by showing
that the mean duration separating successive utterances is longer
when the previous utterance is by self that when it is by other.
Both infant and mother respond to each other faster than they
repeat an utterance of their own. Despite evidence that infants
are capable of selective vocalization from the age of 2 months
(Delack and Fowlow, 1978; Bloom, 1990; D’Odorico and Franco,
1991), there remains some controversy over the extent to which
young infants actively contribute to turn-taking exchanges and
the extent to which adults construct conversational frameworks
for infant vocalization.
If infants partake in a truly co-regulated turn-taking, they
must have the ability to perceive the contingent relations between
their own behavior and that of their partner. These contingent
relations hinge on the perception of timing in social interaction.
Research has shown that infants’ sensitivity to contingency
changes right around the time when protoconversations appear,
around the age of 2 months (Striano et al., 2005). The stillface paradigm has demonstrated that by 2 months infants react
to the sudden interruption of social interaction by the mother
with reduced smiling and gazing and increased fussiness and
self-comforting behavior (Tronick et al., 1978). Murray and
Trevarthen’s (1985, 1986) closed-circuit double-TV paradigm
shows that infants as young as 6 weeks are sensitive to social
contingencies. When infants and mothers are made to interact
via a live closed-circuit television set up, they are able to
establish mutual gaze and partake in relaxed protoconversational
interaction involving imitation across multiple modalities.
However, when a sequence from the previous recording is
replayed to either mother or infant with a few minutes delay, each
partner becomes perturbed, expressing anxiety and aloofness.
A 3 s window appears to reflect contingency for a wide range
of behaviors involved in spontaneous social interaction (Van
Egeren et al., 2001). The timing of an infant’s response to the
partner has often been taken as a demonstration of the kind of
active interpersonal coordination that underlies communication
between adults.
Starting around the age of 2 months, the cooing stage (Oller,
1980; Stark, 1980) is associated with a marked rise in face-to-face
interaction described as primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen,
1977; Lavelli and Fogel, 2013). By the age of 4 months, however,
infants’ interest shifts from an intense involvement with other
people to involvement with objects (Trevarthen and Hubley,

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 237

Gratier et al.

1978; Cohn and Tronick, 1987). In interactive object play, adults
and infants become engaged in doing things together, such as
exploring objects or using them in novel ways. It is not clear
from the existing literature whether the shift from primary
intersubjectivity to object play involves a change in the turntaking organization of social interaction. Indeed, very few studies
have focused on turn-taking in social interactions with infants
involving object play or joint attention.
One longitudinal study has reported a quantitative increase in
vocal turn-taking with less overlapping vocalization between 12
and 18 weeks of age (Ginsburg and Kilbourne, 1988) suggesting
infants’ turn-taking competence increases around 4 months of
age. Another study supporting the hypothesis that infants’ turntaking competence increases with age was conducted by Rutter
and Durkin (1987). Using both a transversal and a longitudinal
design, this study focused on vocal and gaze coordination from
the end of the first year to the end of the third year of life.
According to these researchers, infants younger than 24 months
more frequently interrupt their mothers, whereas after this age
they begin to truly coordinate their vocalizations with those of the
mother. They also found that infants use gaze to actively signal
the end of a turn by the age of 18 months. At this age, their
gaze patterns begin to resemble those used in adult conversation
in that they indicate giving the floor to their interlocutor and
confirm when the floor is about to be offered to them by looking
up at the interlocutor at the end of a turn.
The most detailed longitudinal study of the timing of turntaking in infancy was conducted recently by Hilbrink et al.
(submitted) on 12 infants aged between 3 and 18 months. These
researchers report on the prevalence of turn-taking exchanges
throughout the period they studied. They also find that turntaking organization varies little between 3, 4, and 5 months
of age but that turns slow down markedly around the age of
9 months. At this age infants respond to mothers’ utterances
with longer gaps whereas maternal turn-timing remains stable
over time. Furthermore, this study shows that the amount of
overlap in turn-taking remains constant between 3 and 5 months
of age but decreases thereafter. The slowing down of turn-taking
can be associated with important qualitative changes in social
interaction and communicative skills such as joint attention.
The present paper assesses developmental change in turntaking organization between the 3rd and the 5th months of
life. We first aimed to explore the hypothesis that turn-taking
is, from the first weeks of life, a mutually coordinated effort
and then to assess developmental change and stability in the
amount of overlap, duration of switching pauses (gap) between
turns and length of TTSs. We thus compared spontaneous vocal
interactions between mothers and infants ages between 2 and
3 months with those of mothers with 4-to-5-months-old infants.

Materials and Methods
Participants
Fifty one MI dyads participated in this study. Infants were aged
between 8 and 21 weeks [28 boys and 23 girls aged respectively
12.8 weeks ± 3.77 (range: 8–19) and 13.2 weeks ± 3.73 (range:

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Early development of turn-taking

8–21)], were born full-term and in good health. Out of the 51
mothers, three mothers were bilingual speakers but spoke to
their infants in French. The sample was divided into two age
groups: a group of ‘younger’ infants (35 8–13 weeks, mean age
10.8 weeks ± 1.54, 15 girls) and a group of ‘older’ infants (15 17–
21 weeks, mean age 18.3 ± 1.24, 8 girls). The present research was
approved by the university ethics committee (CCP n◦ 1450089).

Apparatus and Procedure
All dyads were recorded in naturalistic contexts, in their
home, when infants were in a quiet alert state. Before each
observation, consent forms were signed by the parents. Mothers
and infants were placed in comfortable positions, facing each
other. Mothers were asked to talk to their infants in their
usual manner for approximately 10 min and to avoid using
any toys. Video and audio recordings were made using two
camcorders (Sony Handycam HDR-CX190) and a digital audio
recorder (Korg Sound on Sound Unlimited Track Recorder)
placed near the dyad. Only the audio recordings were used in this
study.

Acoustic Analysis
Selection of the Audio Samples
A total of 176 audio samples were selected [3.5 audio samples on
average per infant ± 2.2 (range: 1–9). Audio sample length was
on average 106.7 s ± 57.9 (range: 18–252)]. In all 90 min and 41 s
of interaction were analyzed. Samples lasted on average 31 s. The
samples were taken from a large corpus of audio recordings, they
were the first to meet following four selection criteria:
(1) Each sample included at least one vocal contribution by the
infant and no negative infant vocalizations (fuss, cry).
(2) In each sample, mothers addressed their infant directly.
Sequences including song to infants were discarded.
(3) Samples were segmented based on pause duration: pauses
between vocalizations that exceeded 3 s marked the end of
the selected audio sample.
(4) Recording quality was optimal for all samples.

Software
We used Sound Analysis Pro (Tchernichovski et al., 2000) to
segment the sequences and to obtain acoustic measures of
individual vocalizations. Sound Analysis Pro is used primarily
in studies of birdsong but has recently been used successfully
to study infant vocalization (Lipkind et al., 2013). Data were
exported and manipulated in Excel.

Coding of Vocalizations and Pauses
Based on visualization of spectrograms and audio guidance,
each sequence was manually segmented into 4 types of
events: maternal vocalization, infant vocalization, overlapping
vocalization and pause, according to the following criteria:
(1) A vocalization (either by mother or infant) was defined
as the production of vocal sound by one partner that was
either continuous or included unvoiced segments of less than
300 ms. If the silent pause following an audible vocal sound

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 238

Gratier et al.

was greater than 300 ms, two successive vocalizations were
coded.
(2) Overlapping vocalization was coded when either mother or
infant vocalized over the vocalization of the partner. The
entire vocalization was coded as overlapping even if it was
only partially masked by the partner’s vocalization.
(3) Pauses occurred either between two vocalizations by the
same partner (within- speaker pause) or between alternating
vocalizations (switching pause). Within-speaker pauses had
a duration that was necessarily greater than 300 ms and
lower than 3000 ms. Switching pauses could range from a few
milliseconds to 3000 ms. Two alternating vocalizations were
qualified as latched when the switching pause had a duration
of less than 50 ms.
(4) Vegetative sounds produced by infants such as burps, growls
or hiccups, noise from the environment and vegetative
sounds produced by mothers, such as coughs, were not
coded.

Coding of Turn-Taking Sequences
A TTS was defined as sequence of vocalizations involving at least
one alternation between speakers. Such a sequence could involve
alternation between a vocalization of mother and of infant or
between a vocalization of mother or infant and an overlapping
vocalization. A TTS ended when the same speaker produced at
least two vocalizations in succession or the pause following a
vocalization was greater than 3000 ms.

Acoustic Measures
Sound Analysis Pro (Tchernichovski, 2012) provides automated
analysis of various acoustic features of the segmented sounds.
These include duration, amplitude, pitch, frequency modulation,
and entropy. For this study only durations and frequencies of
vocalizations and pauses were used.

Inter-Coder Reliability
Twenty percent of the data set were double-coded. Intercoder reliability (Pearson product-moment correlations) was
0.87, 0.98, 0.78, and 0.95 respectively for number of infants’
vocalizations, mothers’ vocalizations, vocalizations involving
overlap and pauses. Onset positions were considered identical
if they occurred within 50 ms, thus measures of vocalization
duration had an error tolerance of up to 100 ms. Both coders
correctly identified 80.6% of all onset positions within the subset
of double-coded sequences.

Early development of turn-taking

index of effect size. An alpha level of 0.05 was used for all
statistical tests.

Results
Vocal Production
The entire sample comprised a total of 2943 vocalizations of
which 748 were produced by the infants alone, 1851 were
produced by the mothers alone and 344 involved both mothers
and infants vocalizing in overlap. Thus, the total sample of infant
vocalizations comprised 1092 vocalizations and the total sample
of maternal vocalizations comprises 2195 vocalizations. In total
2152 pauses were identified, of which 838 were switching pauses
(38.9%).

Infant Vocalizations
Infant vocalizations occurring within less than 3 s of a maternal
vocalization, i.e., involved in turn taking, represented 73.1% of all
infant vocalizations (see Table 1). Infant vocalizations which were
not involved in turn taking were produced either after an infant
vocalization (12.8%) or were isolated, i.e., were neither preceded
nor followed by another vocalization (14.1%). The proportion
of infant vocalization occurring within TTSs was higher among
younger infants than among older infants (78.7% vs. 62.2%;
OR = 2.25, 95% CI: 1.69 2.99, p < 0.0001).
Among the vocalizations occurring within TTSs, some were
overlapping vocalizations (n = 344; 31.5%), and the remaining
were vocalizations that followed a maternal vocalization
(n = 454; 41.6%). These were either latched vocalizations, that is
vocalizations occurring without an intervening pause (n = 202;
18.5%) or vocalizations involving a switching pause (n = 252;
23.1%; see Table 1). Contingency analysis conducted on type of
vocalization revealed a significant age effect (Chi square = 39.8;
p < 0.0001; Cramer’s V = 0.21): older infants vocalized
twice in succession more frequently than younger infants
whereas vocalizations occurring after a switching pause were
more frequent among the younger infants. No difference was
observed between the two groups for frequency of overlapping
vocalizations (see Figure 1).
Infant vocalizations lasted on average 869.7 ms ± 662.3 (range:
50.2–3640.0). Multiple regression conducted on the durations of
vocalizations revealed no effect of age (p = 0.49), but a significant
gender effect: girls’ vocalizations were on average 108 ms longer
than boys’ vocalizations (p = 0.049).

Maternal Vocalizations

Statistics
Analysis was done with Stata for Windows (version 12). Multiple
regression was used to compute partial regression coefficients and
logistic regression to estimate ORs and Wald 95% CIs (Cohen
et al., 2003). Age (8–13 weeks vs. older than 13 weeks) and gender
were treated as binary variables and included in the model as
factors, and dyads as potential confounders. A general linear
model (GLM) was used to analyze number of vocalizations per
minute, with infants’ gender and age as factors and including
partial eta square as index of effect size. A chi square test was
applied on the contingency tables, including Cramer’s V as an

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Maternal vocalizations occurring within less than 3 s of an
infant vocalization – i.e., involved in turn taking – represented
35.8% of all maternal vocalizations (see Table 2). One in five
mother vocalizations was consecutive to an infant vocalization
(441; 20%), either as a latched turn (n = 184; 8%) or involving
a switching pause (n = 257; 12%). Only 13.5% of mother
vocalizations were not embedded in a sequence of vocalizations
(n = 297) and 51% were preceded by a maternal vocalization
(n = 1113).
Contingency analysis conducted on type of vocalization
revealed a significant age effect (Chi square = 51.6; p < 0.0001;

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 239

Gratier et al.

Early development of turn-taking

TABLE 1 | Proportions of infant vocalizations according to position in relation to other vocalizations and pauses.
Infant vocalizations (N = 1092)
All infants (N = 1092)

8–13 weeks (N = 719)

17–21 weeks (N = 373)

N

%

N

%

N

%

140

12.8%

66

9.2%

74

19.8%

Preceded by mother vocalization with pause

252

23.1%

195

27.1%

57

15.3%

Preceded by mother vocalization without pause

202

18.5%

145

20.2%

57

15.3%

Involving overlap

344

31.5%

226

31.4%

118

31.6%

154

14.1%

87

12.1%

67

18.0%

Vocalizations preceded by another infant vocalization
Vocalizations involved in turn taking

Isolated vocalizations
Neither preceded nor followed by any other vocalization

FIGURE 1 | Proportions of infant vocalization according to age.
TABLE 2 | Proportions of maternal vocalizations according to position in relation to other vocalizations and pauses.
Mother vocalizations (N = 2195)
All mothers (N = 2195)

8–13 weeks (N = 1704)

17–21 weeks (N = 491)

N

%

N

%

N

%

1113

50.7%

928

54.5%

185

37.7%

Preceded by infant vocalization with pause

257

11.7%

202

11.9%

55

11.2%

Preceded by infant vocalization without pause

184

8.4%

136

8.0%

48

9.8%

Involving overlap

344

15.7%

226

13.3%

118

24.0%

297

13.5%

212

12.4%

85

17.3%

Vocalizations preceded by another mother vocalization
Vocalizations involved in turn taking

Isolated vocalizations
Neither preceded nor followed by any other vocalization

Cramer’s V = 0.16). Mothers vocalized twice in succession more
frequently with younger infants but overlap was more frequent
for mothers of older infants (see Figure 2).
Mothers’ vocalizations lasted on average 1144.7 ms ± 904.9
(range: 50–9803). Multiple regression conducted on the

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

durations of the vocalizations showed a significant effect of
age: the vocalizations of mothers of younger infants were on
average 399 ms longer than those of mothers of older infants
(p < 0.0001). A gender effect was also observed, mothers of boys
vocalizing on average longer (p = 0.034).

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 240

Gratier et al.

Early development of turn-taking

FIGURE 2 | Proportions of maternal vocalization according to infant age.

Vocalizations Involving Overlap
Vocalizations
involving overlap lasted on average
1550.7 ms ± 1090.1 (range: 110–4928). Multiple regression
conducted on the durations of the 344 overlapping vocalizations
revealed a significant effect of age: overlapping vocalizations
involving younger infants were 812 ms longer than those
involving older infants (p < 0.0001). No gender effect was found
(p = 0.25). Analysis of the number of vocalizations per minute
revealed no significant effects, neither for gender (p = 0.96) nor
for age (p = 0.92).

Latched Turns
Among the 454 turns produced by infants 44.5% (n = 202) were
latched, i.e., without a pause between alternating vocalizations.
This proportion was quantitatively higher for older infants than
for younger ones but not significantly so (50.0% vs. 42.6%;
OR = 1.34, 95% CI: 0.86 2.10, p = 0.19). Maternal vocalizations
preceding a latched turn by the infant were shorter, though
not significantly so, than those involved in turns including a
switching pause (1089 ms vs. 1152 ms; p = 0.35). Among
the 441 turns performed by mothers, 41.7% were latched. This
proportion was quantitatively higher when mothers responded
to older infants than when they responded to younger infants,
but again not significantly so (46.6% vs. 40.2%; OR = 1.29,
95% CI: 0.81 2.07, p = 0.26). Infant vocalizations preceding
a latched turn by the mother had the same duration as those
involved in turns including a switching pause (respectively 869
and 870 ms).

Pauses
Within-Speaker Pauses
Pauses between vocalizations by the same speaker, which were
by definition restricted to the range of 300 to 3000 ms, lasted
on average 745.5 ms ± 557.0 (range: 310–2643.6) for infants

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

and 967.3 ms ± 606.4 (range: 300–2994.8) for mothers. Multiple
regression analysis revealed that within speaker pauses were
not significantly different according to age, neither for infant
(p = 0.82) or for mothers (p = 0.60). No gender effect was found.

Switching Pauses
The samples comprised 838 switching pauses lasting on average
730 ms ± 543.6 (range: 50–2974). Multiple regression analysis
showed that switching pauses were on average 174.0 ms longer in
samples involving older infants (p = 0.007). No significant gender
effect was found (p = 0.16).
Among the switching pauses, 60.5% concerned pairs of
vocalizations that were either between an IM pair of vocalizations
(30.1%) or between a MI pair of vocalization (30.4%),
i.e., switching pauses which did not involve an overlapping
vocalization. Both types of switching pause were analyzed
separately. Multiple regression analysis confirmed the overall
age effect for all switching pauses (p = 0.013) and showed
that switching pauses inside an IM pair of vocalizations were
on average 135.4 ms shorter than those inside a MI pair of
vocalizations (p = 0.014). This difference was not impacted by
infant age (p = 0.68).

Turn-Taking Sequences
In total, 489 TTSs were identified, lasting on average 5.68 s ± 4.39
(range: 0.3–28.2) and ranging from 2 to 18 turns (mode of three
turns, i.e., three alternating vocalizations). Because duration and
number of turns were highly correlated [r = 0.81; t(487) = 30.6,
p < 0.0001], both measures were analyzed separately in order to
appreciate whether they were likely to be explained by age.
Multiple regression conducted on the number of turns per
TTS did not reveal any significant effect, neither of age (p = 0.57)
nor of gender (p = 0.56). However, we did observe a significant
difference between both age groups regarding the duration of

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 241

Gratier et al.

TTSs: TTSs of older infants lasted 1.22 s longer (p = 0.005; see
Figure 3). No significant gender effect was found (p = 0.53).
TTSs were divided into two subgroups depending on which
partner initiated the sequence. Sequence initiation was coded
when a vocalization occurring after a pause lasting at least 3 s
was followed by at least one vocalization by the partner within
less than 3 s. Among the 489 TTSs collected, 44.8% were initiated
by infants. Logistic regression showed that TTS initiation by
infant was most likely to occur in older infants (p = 0.003;
OR = 1.8, 95% CI: 1.22 2.77). No significant gender effect was
found (p = 0.30).
Turn-taking sequences were also divided in two subgroups
according to which partner terminated the sequence. A sequence
termination was coded when a vocalization following at least one
vocalization by the partner within less than 3 s was followed
by a pause of at least 3 s. Among the 489 TTSs observed, 37
(7.6%) ended with a co-vocalization and were then excluded from
analysis. Twenty four percent of the remaining 447 TTSs were
ended by infants. Logistic regression showed that TTSs were
more likely to be ended by infants in older infants (p = 0.004;
OR = 2.0, 95% CI: 1.26 3.23). We also observed a significant
gender effect: boys were less likely to end a TTS than girls
(p = 0.009; OR = 0.55, 95% CI: 0.35 0.86).

Discussion
In the present study, durational features of vocal interactions
between mothers and infants from two age groups (2–3 and
4–5 months) were collected using acoustic analysis software. The
aim of the study was, first, to ascertain whether vocal exchanges
involving young infants has a turn-taking format and, second, to
investigate developmental change in vocal turn-taking.

Early development of turn-taking

The first finding was that three out of four infant vocalizations
are either followed or preceded by a maternal vocalization.
Infants in both age groups vocalize in turn as frequently, and
the most common turn-taking format at both ages is one
involving three turns (two alternations between mother and
infant). Indeed, infants respond to mothers’ vocalizations as
often as mothers respond to infants’ vocalizations at both ages.
Although the turn-taking format is observed in vocal interactions
of infants aged between 2 and 5 months, the question that needs
addressing is whether mothers are responsible for creating these
formats or whether infants actively partake in shaping TTSs.
One way to investigate infants’ active role in turn-taking is to
ask whether they demonstrate anticipation of the mothers’ turns
and whether they show initiative in generating a vocal response
from the mother. The present study provides partial answers
to these questions because it is based on durational measures
and does not include other acoustic features such as intonation
contour, pitch matching or amplitude modulation. Some of our
findings support the hypothesis that, already from the 2nd month
of life, infants anticipate turns and initiate TTSs.
Infants at both ages used a high proportion of latched turns,
that is they began to vocalize within a few milliseconds (less
than 50 ms) of the end of the mother’s vocalization, without any
overlap. To our knowledge, no study of early MI vocal interaction
has reported on the frequency or significance of latched turns.
This finding is significant in teasing apart the roles of adults
and infants in turn-taking exchanges. Indeed, although latched
turns are less frequent than overlapping vocalization, it seems
implausible that they would occur randomly at the frequencies
we report. The temporal window for initiating vocalization is
markedly smaller for latched turns than for turns involving a
pause and for overlapping vocalizations. Indeed, the average
time frame within which an infant vocalization is described

FIGURE 3 | Distribution of turn-taking sequences according to age and number of turns.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 242

Gratier et al.

as an ‘overlapping vocalization’ in our study is 1145 ms (the
average duration of a maternal vocalization) and the average
time frame within which an infant vocalization is involved in a
turn (excluding latched turns) is 730 ms (the average duration
of a switching pause). The high frequency of latched infant
vocalizations suggests that infants actively shape the turn-taking
organization of an exchange and anticipate events within it.
Based on a comparison of the probabilities of infants producing
different prosodic contours, a previous study showed that 3months-old selectively match their vocalizations to preceding
maternal vocalization (Gratier and Devouche, 2011). Thus the
low probability that an infant should vocalize at a particular
moment in time or in a particular way can be interpreted as a
high probability that the infant vocalizes with purpose.
The finding that infants in the 3rd months already frequently
perform latched turns poses a major challenge. How do young
infants project the end of a turn as precisely as adults do in
verbal conversation, with ‘no-gap-no-overlap’ (Sacks et al., 1974),
without any lexico-syntactic information? Much research has
shown that the projection of turn completion relies principally
on linguistic cues (De Ruiter et al., 2006). It is possible that
infants rely on durational cues to project the end of the mother’s
turn and that mothers too rely on such cues to project the
end of the infant’s vocalization. Maternal speech to infants is
known to be rhythmic, and maternal utterances are usually
short and bound by pauses. In our study, as in previous
studies (Jaffe et al., 2001), maternal vocalizations lasted around
1 s. We wondered whether infants might learn their mothers’
specific time-signature which would enable them to predict with
high precision when most of her utterances end. However, the
duration of the vocalization to which an infant vocalization is
latched does not appear to sufficiently explain the occurrence
of latching. Maternal vocalizations that preceded a latched turn
were only marginally longer that those preceding a switching
pause. Another plausible explanation for the high percentage
of latched turns is that mothers interrupt their utterances as
soon as they perceive the infant is about to vocalize. Mothers
may use cues such as in-breath or change in muscle tone to
predict the onset of an infant vocalization. However, if it were
the case that mothers interrupt their utterances rather than
that infants predict the end of the mother’s utterance, maternal
utterances preceding a latched infant vocalization should have
been found to be shorter than maternal utterances preceding a
switching pause. It is worth investigating whether other acoustic
features might afford turn latching, such as drop in fundamental
frequency and/or intensity. A more complete analysis of acoustic
features of vocalization might provide greater insight into this
phenomenon.
Furthermore, it is interesting to explore the possible functions
of latched turns in protoconversational exchange. The experience
of a seamless transition between self-expression and otherexpression may be highly relevant for a young infant, reinforcing
an emerging sense of agency in the 1st months of life. Latched
turns may be conceived as joint action, where each individual’s
actions are coordinated so as to achieve a joint outcome and
where each individual’s action cannot be understood in isolation
from the others’ (Sebanz et al., 2006).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Early development of turn-taking

Overall, comparison of the two age groups revealed both
continuity and change in turn-taking organization. We do not
find any differences in terms of mean frequency of vocalizations
involving overlap between the two ages. Nor do we find that
the duration of switching pauses decreases with age. On the
contrary in our data they are longer among the older infants.
Older infants do not perform proportionately more latched turns
than younger infants. We did find that switching pauses were
more frequent in younger infants’ interactions. This finding
should entail that younger infants partake in a greater number of
alternating vocalizations but we did not find that the number of
turns within TTSs increases with age. This inconsistency may be
explained by the quantification method we used for turn-taking.
Overlapping vocalizations and latched vocalizations were taken
into account in the quantification of number of turns whereas the
frequency of switching pauses was quantified on the basis of nonoverlapping vocalizations alone. It is therefore not possible to
describe the contribution of each type of vocalization within the
TTSs. Future studies should be aimed at more precise description
of overlapping vocalization in MI interaction.
Turn-taking sequences were found to be longer for older
infants despite the fact that infant vocalizations have similar
durations in both age groups and that mothers’ vocalizations
are shorter in interactions with older infants. Longer TTSs at
4–5 months than at 2–3 months are most likely explained by
the increase in switching pause duration between the two ages.
Furthermore, a greater number of infant vocalizations were
either responded to or were responses to the mother among the
younger infants, and older infants vocalized more often twice in
succession. These two age-related changes may reflect a transition
between the highly social cooing stage and the more solitary
exploratory sound play that follows in vocal development (Oller,
2000). Hilbrink et al. (submitted) related their finding that turntiming slows down around 9 months to the emergence of sociocognitive skills that are crucial for communication and language,
such as joint attention and cooperative cognition. In the present
study too the younger infants responded to maternal vocalization
faster than the older infants did. Similarly, this finding may be
explained by a reorganization of social attention that is known
to occur around 4 months, when infants become increasingly
interested in object play and begin to show shared attention.
Our findings confirm the active role of mothers in adjusting
their vocal behavior to infants. Mothers’ vocalizations were
found to be longer with younger infants, and they produce
more successive vocal utterances when interacting with younger
infants. Mothers perform more latched turns with older infants
and switching pauses between IM pairs of vocalizations are
shorter on average than between MI pairs, suggesting that
mothers respond to infants faster than infants respond to
mothers. In a previous study, the duration of switching pauses
in vocal turn-taking between 2 and 3 months-old infants
and mothers was found to vary cross-culturally in relation
with parenting styles and cultural representations (Gratier,
2003). Switching pause duration may thus reflect mothers’
representation of the infant’s communicative ability more than
the infants’ turn-taking competence. We also found that mothers’
vocalizations are longer with boys than with girls confirming

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 243

Gratier et al.

Early development of turn-taking

that gender-based representations impact infant-directed speech
(Kitamura and Burnham, 2003).
The significance of our findings on initiation and termination
of TTSs is ambiguous. We found that older infants were more
likely to initiate a TTS. However, initiating a sequence does not
imply that older infants show greater initiative in turn-taking,
as this finding could be explained by mothers responding more
often to the vocalizations of older than of younger infants. In
fact, a recent study has shown that, without knowledge of infant
age, naïve listeners implicitly attribute greater communicative
intentionality to vocalizations of 5 months-old infants than to
those of 1 month-old (Gratier et al., submitted). Our data also
show that older infants more frequently terminate TTSs than
younger infants. This may also be seen to reflect the mother’s
stance toward the infant rather than a change in the way
infants organize turn-taking because mothers may not respond
as often to terminal vocalizations with older infants. It would
be interesting to take into account the acoustic characteristics of
these initial and terminal infant vocalizations in order to gain
insight into the question of infant initiative. Prosodic cues such
as intonation contour may signal initiative to mothers, for both
initiating and terminating turn-taking. It is also possible that
mothers do not respond to terminal vocalizations because the
TTS has reached a durational threshold, her unresponsiveness
would then serve a regulatory function. It is worth investigating
the transformations of the two partners’ roles in turn-taking
across ages. Indeed, mothers may progressively give the infant
more and more prominence in the interaction, considering her
more and more as an active partner with “something to say”
while making the rules of turn-taking more salient. Infants may

become less interested in a vocal turn-taking and more interested
in multimodal turn-taking around object play or shared activities.
Overall our findings do not clearly support the hypothesis
that infants’ become more competent at turn-taking between
the 3rd and 5th months of life. Indeed, we find neither shorter
switching pause durations nor less overlap between these ages.
Rather, our findings suggest that turn-taking organization is
sensitive to changes in infants’ social motives, reflecting a growing
involvement in object play and joint activity. Although mothers
are clearly highly adaptive and active in vocal exchanges with
infants, we have found evidence that already very young infants
play an active role in shaping the unfolding of TTSs. This
exploratory study on the early development of turn-taking points
to the possibility that turn-taking in preverbal interaction adapts
to infants’ changing motives for communicating and learning,
and paves the road to the crucial socio-cognitive skills that
precede and enable language use.

References

Cossette, L., Malcuit, G., Pomerleau, A., and Julien, D. (1986). Temporal structure
of maternal language directed at infants 3 months old. Can. J. Psychol. 40,
414–422. doi: 10.1037/h0080106
Delack, L. B., and Fowlow, P. J. (1978). “The ontogenesis of different vocalizations:
development of prosodic contrastivity during the first year of life,” in The
Development of Communication, eds N. Waterson and C. Snow (London:
Wiley), 93–110.
De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
D’Odorico, L., and Franco, F. (1991). Selective production of vocalizations
in different communication contexts. J. Child Lang. 18, 475–499. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900011211
Ginsburg, G. P., and Kilbourne, B. K. (1988). Emergence of vocal
alternation in mother-infant interchanges. J. Child Lang. 15, 221–235.
doi: 10.1017/S0305000900012344
Goodwin, C. (1986). Gestures as a resource for the organization of mutual
orientation. Semiotica 62, 29–49. doi: 10.1515/semi.1986.62.1-2.29
Gratier, M. (2003). Expressive timing and interactional synchrony between
mothers and infants: cultural similarities, cultural differences, and the
immigration experience. Cogn. Dev. 18, 533–554. doi: 10.1016/j.cogdev.
2003.09.009
Gratier, M., and Devouche, E. (2011). Imitation and repetition of prosodic contour
in vocal interaction at 3 months. Dev. Psychol. 47, 67–76. doi: 10.1037/a0020722
Jaffe, J., Beebe, B., Feldstein, S., Crown, C. L., Jasnow, M. D., Rochat, P., et al. (2001).
Rhythms of dialogue in infancy: coordinated timing in development. Monogr.
Soc. Res. Child Dev. 66, 1–8. doi: 10.1111/1540-5834.00137
Keller, H., Lohaus, A., Völker, S., Cappenberg, M., and Chasiotis, A. (1999).
Temporal contingency as an independent component of parenting behavior.
Child Dev. 70, 474–485. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00034

Bateson, M. C. (1975). Mother-infant exchanges: the epigenesis of conversational
interaction. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 263, 101–113. doi: 10.1111/j.17496632.1975.tb41575.x
Beaumont, S. L., and Bloom, K. (1993). Adults’ attributions of intentionality to
vocalizing infants. First Lang. 13, 235–247. doi: 10.1177/014272379301303805
Beebe, B., Jaffe, J., Feldstein, S., Mays, K., and Alson, D. (1985). “Interpersonal
timing: the application of an adult dialogue model to mother-infant vocal and
kinesic interactions,” in Social Perception in Infants, eds T. Field and N. Fox
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation), 217–247.
Bloom, K. (1988). Quality of adult vocalizations affects the quality of infant
vocalizations. J. Child Lang. 15, 469–480. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900012502
Bloom, K., and Lo, E. (1990). Adult perceptions of vocalizing infants. Infant Behav.
Dev. 13, 209–219. doi: 10.1016/0163-6383(90)90031-3
Bloom, K., Russell, A., and Wassenberg, K. (1987). Turn taking affects
the quality of infant vocalizations. J. Child Lang. 14, 211–227. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900012897
Bloom, L. (1990). “Developments in expression: affect and speech,” in Psychological
and Biological Approaches to Emotion, eds N. L. Stein, B. Leventhal, and T.
Trabasso (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.), 215–246.
Caskey, M., Stephens, B., Tucker, R., and Vohr, B. (2011). Importance of parent talk
on the development of preterm infant vocalizations. Pediatrics 128, 910–916.
doi: 10.1542/peds.2011-0609
Cohen, J., Cohen, P., West, S. G., and Aiken, L. S. (2003). Applied Multiple
Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences, 3rd Edn. Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Cohn, J. E., and Tronick, E. (1987). Mother-infant face-to-face interaction: the
sequence of dyadic states at 3, 6, and 9 months. Dev. Psychol. 23, 68–77. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.23.1.68

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the families who participated in
this study. We especially thank Anne Bobin-Bègue and Giulietta
Von Salis for help with data collection, doctors Bourrelier
and Guillemot for providing access to MI health care services
and Rose-Marie Guérinel for help contacting families. We also
gratefully acknowledge the help of Ofer Tchernichovski on the
use of Sound Analysis Pro. This research was supported by the
Fondation de France (reference # 00015165) and by a CAPES
grant (BEX-10506/12-8) from Brazil.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 244

Gratier et al.

Kitamura, C., and Burnham, D. (2003). Pitch and communicative intent in
mother’s speech: adjustments for age and sex in the first year. Infancy 4, 85–110.
doi: 10.1207/S15327078IN0401_5
Lavelli, M., and Fogel, A. (2013). Interdyad differences in early mother–infant faceto-face communication: real-time dynamics and developmental pathways. Dev.
Psychol. 49, 2257–2271. doi: 10.1037/a0032268
Lipkind, D., Marcus, G. F., Bemis, D., Sasahara, K., Jacoby, N., Takahashi, M., et al.
(2013). Stepwise acquisition of vocal combinatorial capacity in songbirds and
human infants. Nature 498, 104–108. doi: 10.1038/nature12173
Magyari, L., and De Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based
on anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00376
Murray, L., and Trevarthen, C. (1985). “Emotional regulations of interactions
between two-month-olds and their mothers,” in Social Perception in Infants,
eds T. M. Field and N. A. Fox (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation),
177–197.
Murray, L., and Trevarthen, C. (1986). The infant’s role in mother–infant
communications. J. Child Lang. 13, 15–29. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900000271
Oller, D. K. (1980). “The emergence of the sounds of speech in infancy,” in
Child Phonology, Vol 1, eds G. Yeni-Komshian, J. Kavanagh, and C. Ferguson
(New York, NY: Academic Press), 93–112.
Oller, D. K. (2000). The Emergence of the Speech Capacity. Hove: Psychology Press.
Oller, D. K., Buder, E. H., Ramsdell, H. L., Warlaumont, A. S., Chorna, L.,
and Bakeman, R. (2013). Functional flexibility of infant vocalization and the
emergence of language. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 110, 6318–6323. doi:
10.1073/pnas.1300337110
Papoušek, M., and Papoušek, H. (1989). Forms and functions of vocal matching
in interactions between mothers and their precanonical infants. First Lang. 9,
137–157. doi: 10.1177/014272378900900603
Rutter, D. R., and Durkin, K. (1987). Turn-taking in mother-infant interaction:
an examination of vocalizations and gaze. Dev. Psychol. 23, 54–61. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.23.1.54
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.1353/lan.1974.0010
Sebanz, N., Bekkering, H., and Knoblich, G. (2006). Joint action: bodies and minds
moving together. Trends Cogn. Sci. 10, 70–76. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2005.12.009
Smith, N. A., and Trainor, L. J. (2008). Infant-directed speech is modulated by
infant feedback. Infancy 13, 410–420. doi: 10.1080/15250000802188719
Stark, R. E. (1980). “Stages of speech development in the first year of life,” in Child
phonology, eds G. Yeni-Komshian, J. Kavanagh, and C. Ferguson (New York,
NY: Academic Press), 73–90.
Stern, D. N., Beebe, B., Jaffe, J., and Bennett, S. L. (1977). “The infant’s stimulus
world during social interaction: a study of caregiver behaviors with particular
reference to repetition timing,” in Studies in Mother–Infant Interaction, ed. H. R.
Schaffer (New York, NY: Academic Press), 177–202.
Stern, D. N., and Gibbon, J. (1979). “Temporal expectancies of social behaviours
in mother-infant play,” in Origins of the Infant’s Social Responsiveness, ed. E. B.
Thoman (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 409–429.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Early development of turn-taking

Stern, D. N., Jaffe, J., Beebe, B., and Bennett, S. L. (1975). Vocalizing in unison
and in alternation: two modes of communication within the mother-infant
dyad. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 263, 89–100. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1975.
tb41574.x
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T.,
et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903
616106
Striano, T., Henning, A., and Stahl, D. (2005). Sensitivity to social contingencies
between 1 and 3 months of age. Dev. Sci. 8, 509–518. doi: 10.1111/j.14677687.2005.00442.x
Tchernichovski, O. (2012). User Manuel. Availble at: http://soundanalysispro.com
Tchernichovski, O., Nottebohm, F., Ho, C. E., Bijan, P., and Mitra, P. P. (2000).
A procedure for an automated measurement of song similarity. Anim. Behav.
59, 1167–1176. doi: 10.1006/anbe.1999.1416
Trevarthen, C. (1977). “Descriptive analyses of infant communicative behavior,”
in Studies in Mother-Infant Interaction, ed. H. R. Schaffer (London: Academic
Press), 227–270.
Trevarthen, C. (1979). “Communication and cooperation in early infancy: a
description of primary intersubjectivity,” in Before Speech: The Beginning
of Interpersonal Communication, ed. M. Bullowa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 321–347.
Trevarthen, C. (1993). “The self-born in intersubjectivity: the psychology of an
infant communicating,” in The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal
Sources of Self-Knowledge, ed. U. Neisser (New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press), 121–173.
Trevarthen, C., and Hubley, P. (1978). “Secondary intersubjectivity: confidence,
confiding and acts of meaning in the first year,” in Action, Gesture and
Symbol: The Emergence of the Language, ed. A. Lock (London: Academic Press),
183–229.
Tronick, E., Als, H., Adamson, L., Wise, S., and Brazelton, T. B. (1978). The
infant’s response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-toface interaction. J. Am. Acad. Child Psychiatry 17, 1–13. doi: 10.1016/S00027138(09)62273-1
Van Egeren, L. A., Barratt, M. S., and Roach, M. A. (2001). Mother–infant
responsiveness: timing, mutual regulation, and interactional context. Dev.
Psychol. 37, 684–697. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.37.5.684
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Gratier, Devouche, Guellai, Infanti, Yilmaz and Parlato-Oliveira.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums
is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the
original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic
practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply
with these terms.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1167 | 245

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 29 September 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01492

Early developmental changes in the
timing of turn-taking: a longitudinal
study of mother–infant interaction
Elma E. Hilbrink1* , Merideth Gattis2 and Stephen C. Levinson 1
1

Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2 School of
Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Edited by:
Marcela Pena,
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile,
Chile
Reviewed by:
Marilyn Vihman,
University of York, UK
Veronica Figueroa,
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main,
Germany
*Correspondence:
Elma E. Hilbrink,
Language and Cognition Department,
Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1,
Nijmegen 6525 XD, Netherlands
elma.hilbrink@mpi.nl
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 21 November 2014
Accepted: 16 September 2015
Published: 29 September 2015
Citation:
Hilbrink EE, Gattis M and Levinson SC
(2015) Early developmental changes
in the timing of turn-taking:
a longitudinal study of mother–infant
interaction. Front. Psychol. 6:1492.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01492

To accomplish a smooth transition in conversation from one speaker to the next, a
tight coordination of interaction between speakers is required. Recent studies of adult
conversation suggest that this close timing of interaction may well be a universal feature
of conversation. In the present paper, we set out to assess the development of this close
timing of turns in infancy in vocal exchanges between mothers and infants. Previous
research has demonstrated an early sensitivity to timing in interactions (e.g., Murray and
Trevarthen, 1985). In contrast, less is known about infants’ abilities to produce turns in
a timely manner and existing findings are rather patchy. We conducted a longitudinal
study of 12 mother–infant dyads in free-play interactions at the ages of 3, 4, 5, 9, 12,
and 18 months. Based on existing work and the predictions made by the Interaction
Engine Hypothesis (Levinson, 2006), we expected that infants would begin to develop
the temporal properties of turn-taking early in infancy but that their timing of turns would
slow down at 12 months, which is around the time when infants start to produce their
first words. Findings were consistent with our predictions: infants were relatively fast
at timing their turn early in infancy but slowed down toward the end of the first year.
Furthermore, the changes observed in infants’ turn-timing skills were not caused by
changes in maternal timing, which remained stable across the 3–18 months period.
However, the slowing down of turn-timing started somewhat earlier than predicted: at
9 months.
Keywords: turn-taking, mother–infant interaction, infants, timing, communicative development

Introduction
For a conversation to run smoothly, a tight coordination of interaction between speakers is
required. In their seminal paper on the organization of turn-taking in conversation Sacks et al.
(1974) noted that in conversation mostly one speaker talks at a time, that occurrences of overlap
(i.e., more than one speaker at the time) are common, but brief, and that the vast majority of turn
transitions (i.e., the switch from one speaker to the next) are characterized by either no gap and
no overlap or by a slight gap or slight overlap. Moreover, a recent study comparing across a variety
of languages demonstrated that this close-timing of turns might be universal (Stivers et al., 2009).
Stivers et al. (2009) compared the turn transitions in naturalistic conversation across 10 diverse
languages that differed, amongst other things, in word order, sound structure, and grammatical
options. They found that, despite of some variation in the overall distributions, turn transitions in
all of the languages had a mode between 0 and 200 ms. This is remarkably fast considering that it

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 246

Hilbrink et al.

takes at least 600 ms to plan a short turn at talk (Levinson, 2013).
This suggests that in order to produce smooth transitions from
one speaker to the next, speakers need to simultaneously listen
to the other speaker, plan their own turn, and predict when to
launch that turn. It therefore comes as no surprise that children
who are still in the process of acquiring language are much slower
than adults. Garvey and Berninger (1981), for example, reported
a mean gap duration of 1100–1800 ms in preschoolers engaged in
child–child conversation. Casillas et al. (under review) reported
a median gap duration in mother child question–answer pairs of
587 ms for children between the ages of 2;8 and 3;5.
The Interaction Engine hypothesis suggests that the
infrastructure for this remarkably tight coordination underlying
conversation is based on our sensitivity to the timing of turns and
our ability to anticipate and recognize others’ communicative
intentions (Levinson, 2006). Moreover, this social interactional
infrastructure is thought to be present early in infancy, before
infants have acquired language, and is hypothesized to be
the foundation for communicative turn-taking. Thus, even
though preschool-aged children have been shown to be slow
compared to adults, the Interaction Engine hypothesis suggests
that preverbal infants already have (parts of) the necessary
interactional infrastructure at their disposal. More specifically,
the Interaction Engine hypothesis suggests that the temporal
aspect of this infrastructure, i.e., turn-timing, develops early
in infancy. Like scholars such as, e.g., Bruner (1975, 1981)
and Bateson (1975) this hypothesis views early mother–infant
exchanges as proto-conversations and places great emphasis on
the role of early interactional skill. But, while Bruner focuses
mostly on speech acts, or understanding of communicative
intentions, the Interaction Engine hypothesis ascribes important
roles to both the understanding of communicative intentions as
well as the temporal aspect of these early exchanges. The present
paper aims to explore the development of the temporal aspect
of turn-taking, i.e., turn-timing, during infancy in naturalistic
interactions.
Infants spend a substantial portion of their awake-time in
face-to-face interactions with their caregivers and it is this faceto-face conversational setting that provides an important context
for infants to start acquiring language. Moreover, well-before
infants have acquired language they start to interact in social
exchanges characterized by turn-taking patterns, such as peeka-boo games and give and take sequences (e.g., Bates et al.,
1975; Ratner and Bruner, 1978; Rochat et al., 1999). Thus, it
is in these face-to-face interactions where one might expect
to observe infants’ earliest communicative abilities. Indeed,
Kaye suggested for example that the burst-pause patterns
observed in sucking during feeding and in facial expressions
in mother–infant face-to-face interactions, resemble the turntaking patterns in communication and could be the basis for
acquiring communicative turn-taking abilities (Kaye, 1977; Kaye
and Fogel, 1980). Furthermore, a recent study on face-to-face
interaction in the first 6 months of life showed that mother and
infant spend most of their time in unilateral communication,
i.e., where mother tries to engage the infant but the infant
is not attending, however, with increasing infant age the time
they spend in symmetrical communication, i.e., being mutually

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

engaged with a joint focus of attention, increases (Hsu and
Fogel, 2003). These mutually engaged interactions can consist
of behaviors in multiple modalities such as vocalizations, gaze
and smiles, which have been shown to be temporally ordered.
For example, Hsu et al. (2001) found that infants’ speech-like
sounds occurred more often when their mothers were smiling,
when infants were looking at their mothers, and also when they
themselves were smiling. Moreover, speech-like vocalizations,
compared to non-speech-like vocalizations, were more likely to
be preceded by maternal smiling, indicating a temporal ordering
of these interactional behaviors.
While the above studies demonstrate the existence of a
general temporal coordination, they do not allow for the finegrained temporal analyses that are common in adult studies on
timing of turns in conversation (e.g., ten Bosch et al., 2005;
Stivers et al., 2009). In order to assess this precise timing of
turns in mother–infant interactions in the present study we
specifically focused on vocal exchanges. Various studies on vocal
exchanges in naturalistic interactions suggest that these early
vocal exchanges between mothers and infants can be described
as conversation-like (Bateson, 1975; Snow, 1977). Furthermore,
several experimental studies, in which it was manipulated
whether infants received contingent responses (i.e., responses
related to the infants’ behavior) or yoked (non-contingent)
responses, have demonstrated that contingent responding has
positive effects on the quality of infant vocalizations and
facilitates turn-taking behavior in vocal exchanges between
mothers and infants (e.g., Bloom et al., 1987; Bloom, 1988;
Masataka, 1993; Goldstein et al., 2003). However, these studies
are solely based on experimental manipulation and only assess
short-term effects. Nevertheless, various scholars have suggested
an important role for early turn-taking behaviors in the
development of language. For example Ginsburg and Kilbourne
(1988) state: “The possibility has become widely accepted over the
past decade that the temporal patterning of social interchanges
involving the young infant has important implications for
linguistic development” (p. 221). Thus infants’ (vocal) turntaking behaviors in face-to-face interactions are suggested to be
among the earliest communicative abilities that infants might
demonstrate.
Some experimental evidence indicates that infants are
sensitive to the timing of turn-taking in social exchanges. Striano
et al. (2006) adapted a setup originally designed by Murray
and Trevarthen (1985), in which mother and infant interact via
screens, by adding a device to the video setup that allowed the
ongoing interaction to be delayed by 1 s. In the original setup
infants saw a live interaction and a replay of the interaction,
while in the adapted version the interaction was delayed (online)
by only 1 s. Similar to Murray and Trevarthen (1985), Striano
et al. (2006) found that 3- and 6- month-olds gazed less at their
mothers during the delayed interaction compared to the live
interaction. In addition, an eye tracking study by Thorgrimsson
(2014) has shown that when 1-year-olds observe two people in a
face-to-face context, they are quicker to shift their gaze to person
(B) when person (A) uttered a sentence compared to when person
(A) emitted a non-speech sound (e.g., throat clearing, singing). In
both conditions person (B) never responded, thus infants could

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 247

Hilbrink et al.

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

not have learned what to expect during the experiment. This
indicates that 1-year-olds expect speech to provoke a response.
Several eye-tracking studies by Casillas and Frank (2013) have
taken this paradigm one step further and have demonstrated
that 1-year-olds are able to anticipate the upcoming turn when
observing two adults or two puppets having a conversation.
Together, these studies demonstrate that from early on in the first
year, before infants have acquired language, infants are sensitive
to changes in the timing of social interactions.
In contrast to infants’ perception and comprehension of
timing, less is known about infants’ abilities to produce turns
in a timely manner, and existing findings are rather patchy.
A few studies have tried to assess turn-timing structure in
infancy. Bateson (1975), for example, provided a detailed
description of five interactions between one mother and her baby
recorded between the ages of 1.5 and 3.5 months. Her analyses
suggested that mother and infant alternated turns and that this
alternation of turns seemed mutual. Both mother and infant
left longer silences between two consecutive utterances made by
themselves compared to when they responded to each other’s
utterances; however, this pattern only reached significance for
the mother. Naturalistic studies further suggest that infants start
out producing a large portion of their vocalizations in overlap
with their mothers’ utterances. The amount of overlapping
vocalizations is said to decrease in favor of a more alternation-like
pattern from around 4 months of age (Elias et al., 1986; Ginsburg
and Kilbourne, 1988; Elias and Broerse, 1996). However, a study
by Rutter and Durkin (1987) assessing turn-timing from 9 to
36 months reported an increase in overlapping vocalizations from
9 to 24 months. In addition, studies assessing precise timing have
also resulted in mixed findings. Table 1 summarizes several of
these earlier studies and their methods. The mean gap durations
reported between the ages of 1 and 4 months range from 800 to
1370 ms (Bateson, 1975; Elias et al., 1986; Beebe et al., 1988).
Jasnow and Feldstein (1986) reported a gap duration for 9month-olds of 875 ms. Whether one would conclude from this
that infants remain stable in their timing or start to speed up
at 9 months depends on which of the studies you rely on for
the gap durations at 1–4 months. To complicate things further,
studies have differed on how to record the timing. Bateson (1975)
for example reported maternal and infant gap durations which
were recorded from the onset of the other’s utterance to the
TABLE 1 | Summary of several studies assessing precise turn-timing in
infancy.
Study

Bateson,
1975

Elias et al.,
1986

Jasnow and
Feldstein, 1986

Beebe
et al., 1988

Age (in months)

1.5–3.5

3–4

9

4

N

1

6

29

15

Average gap
duration in ms
(infant)

1370∗

1200

875

800

Average gap
duration in ms
(mother)

1430∗

750

775

700

∗ Includes

preceding utterance duration.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

onset of their own utterance, i.e., these included not just the
transition from one speaker to the next but also the duration
of the previous utterance. Others chose to look at the actual
silence between two utterances. In other words they measured
the time between the end of the utterance of one speaker to
the beginning of the utterance of the next speaker (Elias et al.,
1986; Jasnow and Feldstein, 1986; Beebe et al., 1988). Together,
these findings demonstrate that the developmental picture of
infant turn-timing is far from clear. Furthermore, previous
findings are mostly based on only one age group or on crosssectional samples. Longitudinal designs tracking development
over extended periods of time could provide valuable insights
about stability and developmental change in turn-timing skills.
A few longitudinal studies exist, but these studies are based
on small samples including 1–3 children and/or cover a short
period of time, i.e., 3–5 months (e.g., Bateson, 1975; Snow, 1977;
Ginsburg and Kilbourne, 1988).
In addition to the questions about the developmental
trajectory, considerable debate exists with respect to whether
these vocal exchanges between mothers and their infants are
reciprocally structured. Or whether in fact infants are randomly
vocalizing while mothers are responsible for establishing a turntaking structure, with possible observed changes due to changes
in maternal behavior. Snow (1977) suggested that mothers are
mainly responsible for maintaining the conversational structure.
Anderson et al. (1977) found evidence for reciprocity in vocal
exchanges at 3 months of age, while Rosenthal (1982) observed
reciprocity in vocal interactions of neonates and their mothers.
Furthermore, Jasnow and Feldstein (1986), Beebe et al. (1988),
Jaffe et al. (2001) conducted a series of studies to assess mothers’
and infants’ capacity for interpersonal accommodation to gap
durations (i.e., whether the moment of silence between speaker
transitions is sensitive to the partner’s timing). The findings
of these studies suggest that by 9 months of age infants’ gap
durations were influenced by their mothers’ gap durations and
vice versa. Jasnow and Feldstein (1986) called this interpersonal
accommodation. Furthermore, they found that 4-month-olds
change the length of their gap durations depending on who
they interact with. For example, 4-month-olds left longer pauses
when interacting with their mothers compared to when they were
interacting with a stranger. This finding suggests that, contrary to
Snow (1977), even 4-month-olds might be accommodating their
gap durations.
There remains then considerable uncertainty about the
development of turn-timing in preverbal infants. Especially with
regards to their abilities to produce turns in a timely fashion
and to reciprocally structure vocal exchanges. Existing findings
on mother–infant vocal turn-timing are fragmented and mostly
cross-sectional. Research, and especially longitudinal research,
that tracks the development of turn-timing from early in infancy
until the ages at which infants first start to produce language is
still lacking. Moreover, studies have focused on assessing either
overlapping vocalizations or precise gap durations but not both.
The existing findings on the amount of overlapping vocalizations
suggests a possible early decrease of overlapping vocalizations,
while the various reports on infants’ gap duration suggests
either stability of gap durations across age or a decrease in gap

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 248

Hilbrink et al.

durations. This highlights the possibility that the developmental
pattern for the amount of overlap might be different from the
developmental pattern for gap durations. Therefore, to obtain a
complete developmental picture research is needed that looks at
both overlap and gaps. In studies of adult turn-timing overlap and
gap measurements are often combined in a single floor-transfer
offset measure where overlaps are treated as negative gaps, on
the presumption that adult speakers are aiming at close transition
times and may inadvertently come in early. However, in studies of
infant turn-timing we cannot make the same assumption. Thus,
in addition to the possibility that overlap and gap might show
different developmental patterns, we can also not assume that
infants, like adults, aim at close-transition times. Therefore, the
present study set out to explore the development of turn-timing
in a longitudinal study of mother–infant interaction between the
ages of 3- and 18- months, by assessing, in contrast to earlier
developmental studies, both gaps and overlaps. But, contrary to
studies on adult turn-timing, we analyzed the overlap and gap
durations as separate measurements.
Specifically, the present study aimed to describe the
developmental pattern of infants’ productive turn-timing
abilities, including overlaps, gaps and within-turn pauses, i.e.,
the silence between two consecutive parts of the same turn of
one interlocutor (see Figure 1 for definitions). Furthermore we
aimed to assess whether the observed mother–infant turn-timing
patterns were reciprocally structured. We therefore conducted
a longitudinal study of 12 mother–infant dyads in free-play
interactions at six ages between 3 and 18 months. Based on
previous work we expected that infants would begin to develop
the temporal properties of turn-taking early in infancy. However,
based on earlier work with older children and due to the complex
nature of achieving smooth turn transitions we expected that
at 12 months, i.e., around the time of the onset of language
production, infant turn-timing would slow down (Garvey and
Berninger, 1981; Casillas et al., under review). These predictions
are consistent with the predictions of the Interaction Engine
Hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that preverbal infants
acquire the temporal properties of conversational turn-taking
early in infancy and that once infants start using language their
turn-timing will slow down due to the need to integrate their
developing linguistic skills with the existing interactional timing

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

skills (Levinson, 2006). Furthermore, based on earlier work
by Anderson et al. (1977), Jasnow and Feldstein (1986), Beebe
et al. (1988), Jaffe et al. (2001) we expected that the observed
turn-timing patterns were reciprocally structured at all ages.

Materials and Methods
Participants
For the present study free-play recordings from 12 mother–infant
dyads (seven female) were analyzed when the infants were 3,
4, 5, 9, 12, and 18 months. Infants were originally recruited
as part of the First Steps longitudinal study (Ellis-Davies et al.,
2012). First Steps followed 39 healthy infants (18 female) from
birth to 18 months. The study consisted of monthly testing on
a variety of measures, free-play observations, diary data and
questionnaires from 2 months onward. Infants were born to full
gestation. All procedures for data collection were reviewed and
approved by the Southeast Wales Research Ethics Committee of
NHS Wales. In addition, all procedures and data analyses used
in the present study were approved by the Radboud University
Ethics committee under the research program: INTERACTDevelopmental studies (Hilbrink and Levinson; project code
ECG2012-2711-065). Written consent was obtained from all
parents before the start of the study. Parents’ level of education
ranged from secondary school to postgraduate. Demographics
on the full sample are available in Ellis-Davies et al. (2012).
The level of education and maternal age of the 12 mothers in
the present sample are comparable to the level of education
and maternal age of the full sample (see Table 2). Parents
were recruited during pregnancy through newspaper and web
announcements and local events for expecting parents. The
ages analyzed in the present study were chosen based on
previous literature indicating an important transition around
4 months of age from vocalizing in overlap to a more turn-taking
like pattern (Ginsburg and Kilbourne, 1988) and on studies
suggesting important changes in communicative development
emerging at 9 months (Bakeman and Adamson, 1984; Carpenter
et al., 1998). In addition, ages were also chosen based on the
TABLE 2 | Demographic characteristics of the total sample and the current
sample.
Maternal
characteristics

Total
sample (%)

Total
sample N

Current
sample (%)

Current
sample N

16–20

0

0

0

0

21–25

11.11

4

8

1

26–30

25.00

9

25

3

31–35

33.33

12

33

4

36–40

30.56

11

33

4

Age in years at
recruitment into the study

Highest level of education
attained
FIGURE 1 | A turn transition can consist of an overlap, a gap or if no
turn transition occurs, a within-turn pause can occur.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

High school

22.22

8

33

4

Undergraduate degree

52.78

19

50

6

Postgraduate degree

25.00

9

17

2

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 249

Hilbrink et al.

predictions made by the Interaction Engine Hypothesis that the
temporal properties of turn-taking are realized early in infancy
and are expected to change once infants start to acquire language
(Levinson, 2006).

Procedure and Design
Mothers brought their infants to a ‘mum and baby breakfast’
at a community center or the university. For the present study
only the recordings of the 10-min free-play mother–infant
interactions were used. After mother and infant were seated
mothers were asked to play with their infants as they would do at
home. Although toys were available, mothers were not specifically
instructed to use them. The experimenter would then leave the
room and return after 10 min had passed.

Apparatus
The free-play interactions took place in a quiet room inside a tent,
at 3, 4, and 5 months, or in a playpen, at 9, 12, and 18 months.
Both setups were adapted to the needs of the infants at the various
ages. To create privacy and consistency of visual environment,
the mother–infant interactions at the younger ages (i.e., 3, 4, and
5 months) were conducted in a colorful tent. Infants were seated
in a baby seat and the mother sat facing the infant. Three baskets
containing age-appropriate toys, including soft toys, books and
rattles were provided. The interactions were recorded using two
static cameras, one filming the mother and the other filming
the infant. Two microphones (AKG C1000S) recorded the sound
from the same location as the two static cameras. A third camera
was mounted on the mother’s head with a headband allowing us
to capture where the mother was looking. The signals of each of
the three cameras were combined using a quad splitter, which
resulted in a single time-synced split-screen video record.
At the older ages (i.e., 9, 12, and 18 months) the set-up was
similar but because infants were able to sit upright and to move
somewhat more, the tent was replaced by a playpen. This setup
allowed infants to sit upright in a supportive seat within reach
of the three baskets with toys. Interactions in the playpen were
recorded using four static cameras: one capturing the infant, one
capturing the mother, one capturing both mother and infant, and
one capturing a bird’s eye view of the playpen. The signals from
each of these cameras were combined by a quad splitter, which
resulted in a single time-synced split-screen video.

Transcription
The mother–infant interaction recordings of 12 mother–infant
dyads were transcribed at six time points: 3, 4, 5, 9, 12,
and 18 months of age using ELAN video annotation software
(Sloetjes and Wittenburg, 2008). The 10-min recordings were
transcribed for all maternal speech and for all infant sounds.
Grunting, distress sounds and involuntary sounds, such as
hiccups and sneezes, were excluded from analyses (e.g., Hsu
et al., 2001). Maternal responses to involuntary infant sounds
were, however, included as mothers often treated these sounds
as communicative.
To calculate interrater reliability two recordings at each age
were transcribed by another transcriber. With regards to the
number of vocalizations identified for the infants the intraclass

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

correlation (ICC) was 0.81. The percentage of agreement of a
vocalization being a vocalization and not for example a distress
sound was 76%. With regards to the timing of a vocalization,
coders had to agree within a time window of two frames, i.e.,
80 ms. The percentage of agreement for the time at which a
vocalization started or ended was calculated based on all the
vocalizations the coders agreed on being a vocalization. The
agreement between coders for the time at which a vocalization
started was 92% and the percentage of agreement for when a
vocalization ended was 82%. For the number of utterances made
by the mothers the ICC was 0.82. The percentage of agreement
of an utterance being an utterance was 95%. The percentage of
agreement for when an utterance started was 91% and for when
an utterance ended was 86%.

Results
All turn transitions, both transitions from mother to infant and
from infant to mother, were extracted from the transcriptions.
A turn transition was defined as any switch from a maternal
utterance to an infant vocalization or vice versa (see Figure 1).
This resulted in 8555 turn transitions. As can be seen in
Table 3, some individual variation exists with regards to the
number of turn transitions across dyads at each age. An infant
gap was defined as the gap between a maternal utterance and
a vocalization from the infant, i.e., the onset of an infant
vocalization minus the offset of the preceding maternal utterance.
Maternal gap was measured in a similar way: the onset of the
maternal utterance minus the offset of the preceding infant
vocalization. Infant overlap was defined as transitions in which
the infant started to vocalize when the mother had not yet
finished speaking and maternal overlap was defined as whenever
the mother started speaking when the infant had not yet finished
vocalizing. Infant overlap was measured in the same way as infant
gap durations but resulted, because of the overlap, in negative
durations. Similarly, maternal overlap was measured in the
same way as maternal gap duration. Furthermore, the moments
TABLE 3 | Number of turn transitions per dyad at each age.
Age (in months)
Dyad

3

4

1

107

2

224

3
4

Average
across age

5

9

12

18

108

85

123

225

273

154

213

127

34

130

146

146

119

142

40

46

97

150

99

184

135

96

111

91

98

119

5

41

71

58

56

42

112

63

6

197

111

56

48

148

109

112

7

36

66

92

100

41

208

91

8

129

149

118

83

196

140

136

9

125

158

275

77

147

221

167

10

70

155

179

24

35

175

106

11

88

111

152

184

142

164

140

12

90

54

81

50

91

196

94

Average across infants

118

123

113

78

115

166

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 250

Hilbrink et al.

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

of silence between two consecutive utterances or vocalizations
by the same interlocutor, i.e., without the other interlocutor
producing a turn in between, were also assessed. These withinturn pauses were measured in the same way as infant or maternal
gap durations: the onset of an utterance or vocalization minus the
offset of the preceding utterance or vocalization (see also Figure 1
for the definitions).
To study the development of turn-timing in infancy we
assessed three aspects of turn-timing. First we assessed the
development of timing with regard to overlap. Next we assessed
the development of infants’ ability to time turns with regard to
gap durations. We analyzed these separately (unlike many studies
of adult turn-timing) because the developmental trajectory of
overlapping turn transitions might differ from the developmental
trajectory of transitions containing gaps. The third and final
aspect of turn-timing we assessed was the development of turntiming as whole, (i.e., all turn transitions, overlaps, and gaps) to
assess whether infants’ turn-timing differed from what would be
expected if infants were vocalizing randomly in each age group.
In addition to studying the developmental trajectory of infants’
turn-timing skills, we also explored whether mother–infant
turn-timing patterns were reciprocally structured or whether
changes in maternal behavior could account for possible changes
in infant turn-timing with age. Analyses were conducted in
R Development Core Team (2012) using the LME4 package
(Bates et al., 2012). For the linear mixed effect modeling we
followed the same procedures used by Hoicka and Akhtar (2011)
and Hilbrink et al. (2013). All effects are expressed as odds ratios;
when the odds ratio of an event is greater than one, the event
is more likely to happen than not. The dependent variables that
were included in the models were duration of overlap, duration
of gap, or duration of within-turn pause. The variables that were
included in the models as fixed effects were infant age in months
(3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 18) and whether the overlap or gap durations were
produced by mother or infant, i.e., person. Infant ID was included
as random effect.

in overlap with their mothers. Mothers, produce between 14 and
21% of their turns in overlap with their infants at these same
ages. However, by the time infants are 18 months infants have
decreased the amount of overlap to similar levels as their mothers:
to roughly 20% of their turns.
To assess whether infants also decreased the durations of their
overlapping vocalizations we calculated the median durations
of overlap (total number of overlapping turns: infant = 1180,
mother = 840). Studies on adult turn-timing have demonstrated
that brief overlaps occur often and that adults aim to launch their
turn at the end of the previous turn which can result in brief
overlap (Sacks et al., 1974; Jefferson, 2004). Thus if infants start
decreasing the durations of overlapping turns this could indicate
that they, like adults, are aiming for the end of the previous turn.
Figure 3 shows the infant and maternal median durations of
overlap for each age. To assess whether infants and their mothers
significantly change their duration of overlap we assessed all
overlapping turn transitions using linear mixed modeling in R
with duration of overlap as dependent variable and infant age
and person (mother, infant) as fixed factors. We first build a base
model with duration of overlap as dependent variable and infant
ID as random effect. We compared this base model to models
including age, person and an interaction of age and person.
The base model was improved by adding age, χ2 (1) = 18.97,
p = 0.000, person, χ2 (1) = 51.55, p = 0.000, and an interaction
of age by person, χ2 (1) = 10.27, p = 0.000. The final model
included a significant interaction effect of age by person (model:
loglikehood = −16402, N = 2020), OR = 1369895094, p = 0.001.
To follow up this interaction we created separate models for
mothers and infants. The separate analyses of data including
only the overlap durations of the infants revealed no significant
effect of age. The analyses on the data only including the
maternal overlap durations did reveal a significant effect of age
[χ2 (1) = 13.93, p = 0.000; model: loglikehood = −6865.8].
Maternal overlap durations became significantly shorter with
increasing infant age (OR = 366679967, p = 0.000).

Overlap

Gap

Figure 2 shows the percentage of overlap at each age. At 3, 4, and
5 months infants produce just over a third of their vocalizations

To assess whether and how gap durations changed over time,
infant and maternal median gap durations were calculated for
each age (total number of gaps: infant = 2563, mother = 3992).

FIGURE 2 | Percentage of turns produced in overlap by infants (gray)
and mothers (black).

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

FIGURE 3 | Median durations of overlap for infant (gray) and mother
(black). The closer the median is to zero the shorter the overlapping turn.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 251

Hilbrink et al.

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

See Figure 4 for the median durations at each age and Table 4
for the range of median gap durations observed at each age. To
assess whether these gap durations changed significantly across
age we used linear mixed modeling with duration of the gaps
as dependent variable and age and person (mother, infant) as
fixed factors. We first build a base model with duration of
gap as dependent variable and infant ID as random effect. We
compared this base model to models including age, person and
an interaction of age and person. The base model significantly
improved by adding person, χ2 (1) = 27.34, p = 0.000, an
interaction of person by age, χ2 (2) = 1.23, p = 0.04 and
a trend was found for age, χ2 (1) = 3.26, p = 0.07. The
final model (loglikehood = −58435, N = 6555) contained a
significant effect of age (OR = 2987657, p = 0.01), namely,
gap durations became significantly larger with increasing age,
and a significant age by person interaction, OR = 1.246925e-08,
p = 0.02).
To follow up on the significant age by person interaction,
we created separate models for mothers and infants. The
separate analyses of data including only the gap durations for
mother did not reveal a significant effect of age. The analyses
on the data only including infant gap durations did reveal
a significant effect of age [χ2 (1) = 5.95, p = 0.01; model:
loglikehood = −22928, N = 2563]. The effect of age indicates
that infants’ gap durations increase with age (OR = 5025322,
p = 0.01). Furthermore, inspection of the individual data of the
infants showed, compared to the earlier ages, that all infants
slowed down at some point between 9 and 12 months, with
most of the infants being the slowest at 9 months (8 out of 12
infants). Based on the effect of age, the findings in Figure 4
and our observations in the individual data we conducted
exploratory follow-up analyses to assess the difference in infant
gap durations between 5, 9, 12, and 18 months. To do this
we ran the same linear mixed model analyses on infant gap
durations but separately on data sets including only the data

FIGURE 4 | Median gap durations for infant (gray) and mother (black).

at 5 and 9 months of age, 5 and 12 months of age and 5
and 18 months of age. These analyses revealed an effect of
age for the dataset including 5 and 9 months [χ2 (1) = 25.18,
p = 0.000; model: loglikehood = −5716.9, N = 630] and
the dataset including 5 and 12 months [χ2 (1) = 13.31,
p = 0.000; model: loglikehood = −7001.3, N = 778]. No
effect of age was found for the dataset including the infant
gap durations at 5 and 18 months. Thus infant gap durations
are significantly longer at 9 months compared to 5 months
(OR = 2.806199e+96, p = 0.000) and at 12 months compared to
5 months (OR = 1.724077e+33, p = 0.000), but not at 18 months
compared to 5 months.

Reciprocity: Do Infants Equally Structure the
Interaction?
Thus far the results indicate that infants get better in producing
their turns with less overlap (i.e., they decrease in the amount
of overlap produced) as they get older, and that infant gaps
are relatively short at 3, 4, and 5 months, but increase with
age. However, it is possible that the changes observed in infant
timing are not due to infants’ changing turn-timing skills. Instead
infants could be randomly producing turns, while mothers are
trying to maintain a turn-taking structure by carefully timing
their turns. For example mothers could change, as infants get
older, in how long they wait for a vocalization from the infant.
Especially when infants are older, mothers might expect a turn
from their infant and might therefore increase their pauses
between two consecutive utterances. Therefore we assessed, first,
whether infants timed their turns significantly differently from
what would be expected if they were vocalizing randomly at each
age and, secondly, whether mothers changed their pause duration
between two consecutive utterances.
To assess whether infants were randomly producing turns, we
compared the observed distribution of infants’ turn transitions
(i.e., including both gaps and overlaps) to random distributions.
The random distributions of possible infant turn transitions
were estimated by looking at points in the interaction when
the infant could have taken a turn, but did not. Transitions
were identified where utterance (A) came from the mother and
then the next utterance (B) also came from the mother, without
the infant taking a turn, i.e., maternal within-turn pauses. An
infant producing turns at random points could have taken a
turn within a window of time from the start of the mother’s
turn to the end of the gap (any earlier or later would mean
infants were transitioning from a different turn). Thus, the
maternal turns were kept fixed, while the infants’ turn onsets
varied randomly. The distribution was built by calculating the
height of the distribution at a given distance from the end of
the mother’s turn as the proportion of windows that included
the given point. Because the time window, from the start of

TABLE 4 | Range of median gap durations at each age in ms.
Month 3

Month 4

Month 5

Month 9

Month 12

Month 18

Infant

345.5–902.5

326–921

323–1408

542.5–3297

615–1872

485–1270

Mother

372.5–905.5

412–938

391–1204

445–1005

210–817

135–1145.5

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 252

Hilbrink et al.

the mother’s turn until the end of the gap, always included the
end of the maternal utterance, i.e., zero gap, the distribution
has a peak around zero (see Figure 5). We then compared
this ‘random infant’ distribution to the observed sample of
infant turn transitions. This was done using a permutation
test: i.e., the observations were randomly swapped between the
observed sample and a random sample and then the difference
in medians between these two new samples was calculated.
A 1000 random infant samples were generated and permuted
10,000 times each with the observed sample. If the samples
would have come from the same distribution, then the differences
in medians should be normally distributed around zero. The
probability of the given sample coming from the random
distribution was calculated as the proportion of permutations
resulting in a larger or equal difference in medians between the
permuted samples than the actual difference, i.e., between the
unpermuted samples. This probability was less than 1/10000000.
In other words, out of 10 million permutations, none produced
a difference in medians larger than the actual difference,
suggesting that the actual distributions are significantly different
(p < 0.00000001). Thus, at each age the infant turn transitions
observed in our dataset differed significantly from the random
distributions.
Next we analyzed whether mothers changed their withinturn pause durations, i.e., the silence between two consecutive
utterances, to allow their infants more time to produce a turn.
Maternal median within-turn pause durations did not change
with increasing infant age (see Figure 6 for median within-turn
pauses and Table 5 for the range in medians observed). However,
as can be seen in Figure 6, mothers leave longer pauses after
their own utterances (within-turn pause duration) compared to
when they respond to an infant vocalization (switch), a pattern

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

FIGURE 6 | Mothers’ median within-turn pause durations (solid line)
and median gap durations after an infant vocalization (dashed line).

found in adult–adult interaction. Analyses conducted on the
infant within-turn pause durations revealed a significant effect
for age [χ2 (1) = 27.65, p = 0.000; model: loglikehood = −15068,
N = 1699]. The within-turn pause durations of the infants
significantly increase with age, OR = 5.950459e+18, p = 0.000,
indicating they wait longer after their own turn as they get older.
Furthermore, as can be seen in Figure 7, infants do not yet leave
longer gaps after their own vocalizations compared to after their
mothers’ utterances.

General Discussion
As reported above, we conducted a longitudinal study to explore
the development of the timing of turn-taking in infancy. By
using fine-grained temporal analyses of vocalizations, we were
able to examine the structure and timing of vocal turns and their
developmental trajectory in mother–infant exchanges during the

FIGURE 5 | Dashed lines are the random distributions, solid lines the actual distribution.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 253

Hilbrink et al.

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

TABLE 5 | Range of median within-turn pause durations at each age in ms.
Month 3

Month 4

Month 5

Month 9

Month 12

Month 18

Infant

307–1197.5

320–1208

360–1549

189–5760

420–1925

560–1590

Mother

799–1597

761–1325.5

659–1538

706.5–1559

565–1105

475–1650

FIGURE 7 | Infants’ median within-turn pause durations (solid line) and
median gap durations after an maternal vocalization (dashed line).

first year and a half of life. Thus far, research on the timing
of turn-taking, or turn-timing, in infancy has been fragmented,
mostly cross-sectional, and has either looked at the development
of overlapping vocalizations or gap durations but not both
(e.g., Bateson, 1975; Jasnow and Feldstein, 1986; Elias and
Broerse, 1996). Longitudinal designs including larger samples
and tracking development over extended periods of time can
provide valuable insights into stability and developmental change
in turn-timing skills. We therefore analyzed mother–infant freeplay interactions from 3 to 18 months. This allowed us to track
the development of turn-timing from early in infancy to an
age at which infants begin to acquire productive language. Our
aim was to provide a more concise picture of the development
of turn-timing, including both the development of overlapping
vocalizations and gap durations. Based on previous findings
(Garvey and Berninger, 1981; Casillas et al., under review) and
the predictions made by the Interaction Engine Hypothesis
(Levinson, 2006) we expected that the temporal aspect of turntaking would develop early in infancy but that, when infants
first start to produce language, their timing would slow down.
In addition, we explored whether the turn-timing patterns in
the mother–infant exchanges were reciprocally structured. As
described, we transcribed 10-min free play interactions of 12
mother–infant dyads at the ages of 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, and 18 months,
and extracted all turn transitions from these transcriptions. Next
we analyzed the turn transitions for the developmental patterns
of overlaps, gaps and the transitions as a whole (i.e., both gaps
and overlaps).

Overlap
Infants started out by producing just over a third of their turns
in overlap with their mothers. This amount remained stable
across 3, 4, and 5 months. However, between 5 and 18 months
the amount of overlap decreased to about a fifth of their turns.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Maternal overlap remained relatively stable over time and at
18 months the percentage of turns produced in overlap by infants
was at a similar level to that of their mothers. This finding
suggests that from 5 months onward infants adopt more of
a turn-taking-like structure in interactions with their mothers.
These findings are similar to previous studies reporting a decrease
in overlapping vocalizations from 3 to 6 months and onward
(Elias and Broerse, 1996) and around 4 months of age onward
(Ginsburg and Kilbourne, 1988). In our dataset this decrease in
overlapping vocalizations occurred slightly later, which could be
due to differences in sample size. For example, Ginsburg and
Kilbourne followed three dyads focusing on the period between
2.5 and 5 months. Instead of a decrease, Rutter and Durkin
(1987) observed an increase in overlapping vocalizations from
9 to 24 months of age. However, they suggested that this might
be due to the increasing amount of vocalizations that infants
produced in general. In the present study we analyzed the amount
of overlap by calculating the percentage of turns produced in
overlap, therefore accounting for differences in total number of
turns.
Even though the present data shows that infants start to
decrease the amount of overlap that they produce, this does not
mean that infants, like adults, aim for the end of the previous
turn as the place to launch their own turn (Sacks et al., 1974;
Jefferson, 2004). If that were the case we should also see that
infants produce shorter overlap durations as they get older. We
therefore analyzed the median overlap durations. These analyses
revealed that infant overlap durations remained stable with age,
while overlap durations of the mothers decreased with infant age.
To summarize, mothers and infants start to adopt a more turntaking like pattern in vocal exchanges from around 5 months
onward as evidenced by the decrease in the percentage of overlap
that infants produce. However, when infants do produce their
turns in overlap they do not yet seem to be aiming, like adults,
for the end of the turn.

Gap
Analyses on the median gap durations revealed that the gap
durations of the mothers remained fairly stable over time, but
infants’ gap durations became significantly longer with age.
Further exploratory analyses comparing infant gap durations
at 5 months with the gap durations at 9, 12, and 18 months
respectively revealed that infants were significantly faster at
5 months compared to at 9 and 12 months, but not at 18 months.
Together, these findings suggest that infants are initially relatively
fast in responding to their mothers’ turn, but slow down
considerably at 9 months after which they start to pick up speed
again. This is consistent with our expectations based on previous
work and the Interaction Engine Hypothesis (Garvey and
Berninger, 1981; Levinson, 2006; Casillas et al., under review).

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 254

Hilbrink et al.

However, infants start slowing down somewhat earlier than
expected. We expected that the slowing down would coincide
with the emergence of productive language, which would be
around 12 months instead of at 9 months. Our reasoning was
that infants would slow down when they need to integrate these
developing linguistic skills with their existing interactional timing
skills and 9 months would be somewhat too early for this to
occur. An alternative explanation for this finding might be found
in infants’ changing communicative understanding. The period
from 9 months onward is an age at which it has been shown
that several skills relevant to communication are emerging, such
as joint attention and pointing (e.g., Bakeman and Adamson,
1984; Carpenter et al., 1998). Furthermore, research has shown
that this is the period in which infants begin to see others as
intentional agents, which is suggested to be the prerequisite for
word learning (Carpenter et al., 1998). In other words, infants at
this age start to acquire an understanding of the communicative
and shared function of social interactions. Thus, the finding that
infants are slowing down in their turn-timing around 9 months
of age might not be as surprising, as it occurs at an age at
which infants are expected to be increasing their communicative
understanding of social exchanges. However, more research is
necessary to establish whether infants changing communicative
understanding is indeed related to the slowing down observed at
9 months. This hypothesis is currently under further exploration.
Another explanation might be found in a relation between the
decrease in the amount of overlap and the increase in gap
durations. It is possible that the decrease in overlap reflects some
basic understanding of turn-taking, i.e., waiting to launch your
turn until your interlocutor is finished speaking. This in turn
could cause the increase in gap duration because infants are
waiting until the end of their mother’s turn. However, when
infants produce overlap at 9 months and older they do not show
a decrease in the durations of these overlaps, which is what
you would also expect if infants are waiting until the end of
the turn. Nevertheless, the possibility that the increase in gap
durations is related to the decrease in overlaps deserves further
study.

Reciprocity
Work by Anderson et al. (1977), Jasnow and Feldstein (1986),
Beebe et al. (1988), Jaffe et al. (2001), showed that infants at
4 months adjusted their gap durations on the basis of who they
interacted with. Furthermore, they showed that at 9 months
maternal gap durations were influenced by infant gap durations
and vice versa. Based on this earlier work we expected to find
evidence of reciprocally structured turn-timing patterns at all
ages. This is exactly what we found. In the present study maternal
turn-timing remains fairly stable over time, while infant turntiming is changing considerably: the amount of overlapping
vocalizations decreases with infant age, while their gap durations
seem to be much longer around 9 and 12 months of age
compared to the gap durations at 3, 4, and 5 months. But,
even though this indicates that infants are changing their turntiming behavior over time, it is still possible that infants were
vocalizing randomly while mothers were mainly responsible for
establishing a turn-taking structure. Mothers could have changed,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

for example, how long they will wait for their infant to produce
a turn after their own utterances, i.e., the duration of mothers’
within-turn pause. Longer maternal within-turn pause durations
could explain a decrease in infant overlapping vocalizations
because infants are given more time to respond. We therefore
ran two analyses to assess the reciprocity of the vocal exchanges.
We first analyzed whether the observed distribution of median
durations of turn transitions was significantly different compared
to randomly sampled distributions. This analysis revealed that
the observed data was different from random distributions at all
ages. Next we analyzed maternal within-turn pause durations.
This revealed that mothers do not change their within-turn pause
durations with increasing infant age. They wait equally long for
an infant turn regardless of infant age. Thus the decrease in the
percentage of turns that infants produce in overlap cannot be
explained by a change in maternal within-turn pauses. Mothers
do produce longer within-turn pauses compared to their gap
durations when responding to an infant vocalization, which is
similar to what Bateson (1975) found in her observation of
mother–infant vocal exchanges. This suggests that in general,
at all observed ages, mothers respond faster after an infant
vocalization compared to after their own utterances. Bateson
also observed a similar trend for the infant in her study, which
is different from what we observed in the present data. This
difference could be due to differences in definitions: Bateson
calculated the within-turn pause from the onset of the utterance
until the onset of the next utterance, i.e., including the preceding
utterance, while in the present study within-turn pauses were
calculated from the end of utterance until the beginning of
the next utterance. In addition, there is also a difference in
sample size: Bateson followed one dyad from 1.5 to 3.5 months
while the present study followed 12 mother–infant dyads across
a longer period of time. Our findings show clear changes in
infant turn-timing skills which do not seem to be due to
differences in maternal turn-timing as mothers remain stable
with regards to the amount of overlap they produce, their gap
durations and their within-turn pause durations. Infants thus
seem to actively contribute to the observed changes in turntiming.
The present findings provide some initial support for the
Interaction Engine hypothesis, especially the findings with
regards to the gap durations which are relatively short early
in infancy but have increased considerably around 9 months.
This slowing down coincides with a period of important
changes in infants’ communicative and social understanding
of interactions (e.g., Bakeman and Adamson, 1984; Carpenter
et al., 1998). However, more research is needed to further
explore what exactly is driving this change in turn-timing and
whether this slowing down is related to infants’ advancing
communicative understanding of interaction. Future studies
should combine experimental methods that assess infants’ turntiming skills with assessments (e.g., experiments or parental
report) of infants’ language comprehension and production skills,
to disentangle possible links between infant turn-timing and
language production and between infant turn-timing and their
understanding of language. Moreover, research should aim to
assess whether the changes observed in timing in this study are

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 255

Hilbrink et al.

related to infants’ changing understanding of the communicative
and social function of social exchanges. One possible explanation
for why infants are slowing down we are currently exploring, is
whether the complexity of infant vocalizations might be related
to turn-timing. A recent study by Casillas et al. (under review)
has demonstrated such complexity effects on timing in older
children. Furthermore, the present study solely focused on turntiming in vocal exchanges, while turn-taking, and thus turntiming, occurs from early on in infancy in various types of social
exchanges, not necessarily just in vocal exchanges. For example,
give and take sequences involving objects occur from around
9 months of age onward (e.g., Bates et al., 1975). Another option
would be to look at the timing of pointing which emerges between
9 and 12 months. It could be, for example, that infants respond
faster when pointing compared to when using a vocal response.
Analyses of the timing involved in these types of turn-taking
sequences might give additional insights into the role of timing
in interaction in general versus timing specifically related to vocal
exchanges.
The present study found no indication that changes in
maternal timing were responsible for the changes in infant
timing. However, mothers might have been changing other
behaviors that influenced infant timing, including the use of
gestures, facial expressions or changes in the content of the
exchanges. For example, a mother could lean forward toward
her child as to indicate ‘I am handing you the turn,’ which
could facilitate turn-timing. But, if such cues were influencing
the vocal-timing assessed in the present study one would expect
that infants are becoming better with age at interpreting these
cues and therefore will speed up with age instead of slowing
down. Nevertheless, future studies should address the use and
role of multimodal cues on turn-timing. The use of motion
sensors could allow for conducting analyses at the same finegrained level as with vocal turn-timing in the present paper.
In addition, questions remain on how much of the changes
in infant timing are due to social interactional experience.
Based on studies assessing short-term effects of contingent
and non-contingent interaction on infant behavior it seems
likely that early interactional experience plays an important
role (e.g., Bloom et al., 1987; Bloom, 1988; Masataka, 1993).
Nevertheless, more research is needed to further explore the role
of social interactional experience in the first few months of life
on the development of infant turn-timing skills. For example,
short training studies in which parents are trained to provide
contingent feedback could provide insights into the impact of

References
Anderson, B. J., Vietze, P., and Dokecki, P. R. (1977). Reciprocity in
vocal interactions of mothers and infants. Child Dev. 48, 1676–1681. doi:
10.2307/1128534
Bakeman, R., and Adamson, L. B. (1984). Coordinating attention to people and
objects in mother-infant and peer-infant interaction. Child Dev. 55, 1278–1289.
doi: 10.2307/1129997
Bates, E., Camaioni, L., and Volterra, V. (1975). The acquisition of performatives
prior to speech. Merrill-Palmer Q. 21, 205–226.
Bates, D., Maechler, M., and Dai, B. (2012). Lme4: Linear Mixedeffects Models
Using S4 Classes. [Computer Software Manual]. Available at: http://lme4.r-forge.
rproject.org/

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

contingent experience in interaction on infant turn-timing skills
(e.g., McGillion et al., 2014). In addition, studies including
different types of samples, such as infants of mothers who
suffer from postnatal depression, can also shed light on the role
of interactional experience (e.g., Field, 1984). Finally, research
should not ignore the infants’ possible role in the development
of early interactional skills. Infants are likely to differ in how
many opportunities they provide for their mothers to respond, by
gazing, smiling, and vocalizing at their mother. Thus, individual
differences in infant characteristics could also play a role in
infants’ interactional experiences and the development of infant
turn-timing.
The present study is, to our knowledge, the first study to
assess turn-timing in infancy including both overlap and gap.
In addition, we believe the present study is the first to provide
a comprehensive overview of this development including not
only analyses on the amount of overlapping vocalizations, but
also assess the duration of overlap. The longitudinal design of
the study has allowed us to demonstrate that infants’ turntiming skills are changing considerably during infancy and
that these changes occur around the same time as when
infants’ communicative understanding has been found to be
changing (e.g., Bakeman and Adamson, 1984; Carpenter et al.,
1998). Furthermore, maternal turn-timing does not change
much over this period of time indicating that the infants
are actively involved in this observed developmental change.
The observed developmental pattern is consistent with earlier
research (e.g., Garvey and Berninger, 1981; Ginsburg and
Kilbourne, 1988) and the predictions of the Interaction Engine
Hypothesis (Levinson, 2006). Finally, the finding that infants
are relatively fast turn-timers at 3, 4, and 5 months highlights
the existence of remarkable social interactional abilities early in
infancy.

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the ERC Advanced Grant
#269484 INTERACT awarded to SL, the Leverhulme Trust and
the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council. We thank
the First Steps team: Elena Sakkalou, Kate Ellis-Davies, and Nia
Fowler for their contributions to the data collection, Sean Roberts
for helping with the analyses, Paula Fikkert, Imme Lammertink,
Marisa Casillas, and Connie de Vos for their comments, and the
Language and Cognition Department.
Bateson, M. C. (1975). Mother-infant exchanges: the epigenesis of conversational
interaction. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 263, 101–113. doi: 10.1111/j.17496632.1975.tb41575.x
Beebe, B., Alson, D., Jaffe, J., Feldstein, S., and Crown, C. (1988). Vocal
congruence in mother-infant play. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 17, 245–259. doi:
10.1007/BF01686358
Bloom, K. (1988). Quality of adult vocalizations affects the quality of infant
vocalizations. J. Child Lang. 15, 469–480. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900012502
Bloom, K., Russell, A., and Wassenberg, K. (1987). Turn taking affects
the quality of infant vocalizations. J. Child Lang. 14, 211–227. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900012897
Bruner, J. S. (1975). The ontogenesis of speech acts. J. Child Lang. 2, 1–19. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900000866

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 256

Hilbrink et al.

Bruner, J. S. (1981). The social context of language acquisition. Lang. Commun.
1, 155–178. doi: 10.1016/0271-5309(81)90010-0
Carpenter, M., Nagell, K., and Tomasello, M. (1998). Social cognition, joint
attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monogr.
Soc. Res. Child Dev. 63, 1–174. doi: 10.2307/1166214
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2013). “The development of predictive processes in
children’s discourse understanding,” in Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting
of the Cognitive Science Society, eds M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, and
I. Wachsmuth (Austin, TX: Cognitive Society), 299–304.
Elias, G., and Broerse, J. (1996). Developmental changes in the incidence and
likelihood of simultaneous talk during the first two years: a question of function.
J. Child Lang. 23, 201–217. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900010151
Elias, G., Hayes, A., and Broerse, J. (1986). Maternal control of co-vocalization
and inter-speaker silences in mother-infant vocal engagements. J. Child Psychol.
Psychiatry 27, 409–415. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.1986.tb01842.x
Ellis-Davies, K., Sakkalou, E., Fowler, N. C., Hilbrink, E. E., and Gattis, M. (2012).
CUE: the continuous unified electronic diary method. Behav. Res. Methods 44,
1063–1078. doi: 10.3758/s13428-012-0205-1
Field, T. (1984). Early interactions between infants and their postpartum depressed
mothers. Infant Behavior. Dev. 7, 527–532. doi: 10.1016/S0163-6383(84)
80012-0
Garvey, C., and Berninger, G. (1981). Timing and turn taking in children’s
conversations. Discourse Process. 4, 27–57. doi: 10.1080/01638538109
544505
Ginsburg, G. P., and Kilbourne, B. (1988). Emergence of vocal alternation
in mother-infant interchanges. J. Child Lang. 15, 221–235. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900012344
Goldstein, M. H., King, A. P., and West, M. J. (2003). Social interaction shapes
babbling: testing parallels between birdsong and speech. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
U.S.A. 100, 8030–8035. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1332441100
Hilbrink, E., Sakkalou, E., Ellis-Davies, K., Fowler, N., and Gattis, M. (2013).
Selective and faithful imitation at 12 and 15 months. Dev. Sci. 16, 828–840. doi:
10.1111/desc.12070
Hoicka, E. K., and Akhtar, N. (2011). Preschoolers joke with jokers, but
correct foreigners. Dev. Sci. 14, 848–858. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.
01033.x
Hsu, H., and Fogel, A. (2003). Stability and transitions in mother-infant
face-to-face communication during the first 6 months: a microhistorical
approach. Dev. Psychol. 39, 1061–1082. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.39.
6.1061
Hsu, H., Fogel, A., and Messinger, D. S. (2001). Infant non-distress vocalization
during mother-infant face-to-face interaction: factors associated with
quantitative and qualitative differences. Infant Behav. Dev. 24, 107–128.
doi: 10.1016/S0163-6383(01)00061-3
Jaffe, J., Beebe, B., Feldstein, S., Crown, C., and Jasnow, M. D. (2001). Rhythms
of dialogue in infancy: coordinated timing in development. Monogr. Soc. Res.
Child Dev. 66, 1–8.
Jasnow, M., and Feldstein, S. (1986). Adult-like temporal characteristics of
mother-infant vocal interactions. Child Dev. 57, 754–761. doi: 10.2307/
1130352
Jefferson, G. (2004). “A sketch of some orderly aspects of overlap in natural
conversation,” in Conversation Analysis. Studies from the First Generation, ed.
G. H. Lerner (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company), 43–59.
Kaye, K. (1977). “Toward the origin of dialogue,” in Studies in Mother-Infant
Interaction, ed. H. R. Schaffer (London: Academic Press), 89–117.
Kaye, K., and Fogel, A. (1980). The temporal structure of face-to-face
communication between mother and infants. Dev. Psychol. 16, 454–464. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.16.5.454

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Developmental changes in timing of turn-taking

Levinson, S. C. (2006). “On the human “interaction engine”,” in Roots of Human
Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds N. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson
(New York, NY: Berg), 39–69.
Levinson, S. C. (2013). “Action formation and ascription,” in The Handbook
of Conversation Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell), 103–130.
Masataka, N. (1993). Effects of contingent and noncontingent maternal stimulation
on the vocal behavior of three- to four-month-old Japanese infants. J. Child
Lang. 20, 303–312. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900008291
McGillion, M., Pine, J., Herbert, J., and Matthews, D. (2014). A Training Study
to Promote Contingent Talk and Test its Effect on Language Development.
Amsterdam: Talk at IASCL.
Murray, L., and Trevarthen, C. (1985). “Emotional regulation of interactions
between two-month-olds and their mothers,” in Social Perception in Infants,
eds T. M. Field and N. A. Fox (Norwoord, NJ: Alex Publishing Corporation),
177–197.
R Development Core Team (2012). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical
Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at:
http://www.R-project.org/
Ratner, N., and Bruner, J. (1978). Games, social exchanges and the acquisition of
language. J. Child Lang. 5, 391–401. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900002063
Rochat, P., Querido, J. G., and Striano, T. (1999). Emerging sensitivity to the timing
and structure of protoconversation in early infancy. Dev. Psychol. 35, 950–957.
doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.35.4.950
Rosenthal, M. K. (1982). Vocal dialogues in the neonatal period. Dev. Psychol. 18,
17–21. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.18.1.17
Rutter, D. R., and Durkin, K. (1987). Turn-taking in mother-infant interaction:
an examination of vocalizations and gaze. Dev. Psychol. 23, 54–61. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.23.1.54
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. doi:
10.2307/412243
Sloetjes, H., and Wittenburg, P. (2008). “Annotation by category – ELAN, and
ISO DCR,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (Marrakech: LREC 2008).
Snow, C. E. (1977). The development of conversation between mothers and babies.
J. Child Lang. 4, 1–22. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900000453
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Striano, T., Henning, A., and Stahl, D. (2006). Sensitivity to interpersonal timing at
3 and 6 months of age. Interact. Stud. 7, 251–271. doi: 10.1075/is.7.2.08str
ten Bosch, L., Oostdijk, N., and Boves, L. (2005). On temporal aspects of
turn taking in conversational dialogues. Speech Commun. 47, 80–86. doi:
10.1016/j.specom.2005.05.009
Thorgrimsson, G. (2014). Infants’ Understanding of Communication as Participants
and Observers. Ph.D. thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Hilbrink, Gattis and Levinson. This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this
journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution
or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

September 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 1492 | 257

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 08 July 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00890

Turn-taking: a case study of early
gesture and word use in answering
WHERE and WHICH questions
Eve V. Clark * and Kate L. Lindsey
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Edited by:
Kobin H. Kendrick,
Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Elma Hilbrink,
Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Thea Cameron-Faulkner,
University of Manchester, UK
*Correspondence:
Eve V. Clark,
Department of Linguistics, Stanford
University, Margaret Jacks Hall,
Building 460, Stanford,
CA 94305-2150, USA
eclark@stanford.edu
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 03 November 2014
Accepted: 15 June 2015
Published: 08 July 2015
Citation:
Clark EV and Lindsey KL (2015)
Turn-taking: a case study of early
gesture and word use in answering
WHERE and WHICH questions.
Front. Psychol. 6:890.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00890

When young children answer questions, they do so more slowly than adults and appear
to have difficulty finding the appropriate words. Because children leave gaps before they
respond, it is possible that they could answer faster with gestures than with words. In
this study, we compare gestural and verbal responses from one child between the ages
of 1;4 and 3;5, to adult Where and Which questions, which can be answered with
gestures and/or words. After extracting all adult Where and Which questions and child
answers from longitudinal videotaped sessions, we examined the timing from the end
of each question to the start of the response, and compared the timing for gestures
and words. Child responses could take the form of a gesture or word(s); the latter
could be words repeated from the adult question or new words retrieved by the child.
Or responses could be complex: a gesture + word repeat, gesture + new word, or
word repeat + new word. Gestures were the fastest overall, followed successively by
word-repeats, then new-word responses. This ordering, with gestures ahead of words,
suggests that the child knows what to answer but needs more time to retrieve any
relevant words. In short, word retrieval and articulation appear to be bottlenecks in the
timing of responses: both add to the planning required in answering a question.
Keywords: where and which questions, answers, gestures, words, timing

Introduction
When adults answer questions, their answers are surprisingly fast, regardless of the language
involved. The median gap between the end of a yes/no question, for example, and the start of
the answer, is about 200 ms for speakers of English, with a range over other languages from 0 ms
to nearly 400 ms (Stivers et al., 2009). This close timing entails that the addressee begins planning
an answer before the speaker finishes the question. This timing reflects the general principle of ‘no
gap, no overlap’ as speakers participate in conversation.
Young children take much longer to answer questions than adults do (Casillas, 2014a),
apparently waiting until they have heard the full question before they start to plan an answer.
To interpret a question, children must first process its content. [Between 1;6 (1 year, 6 months)
and 3;0, they get much faster, almost to adult speed, in recognizing familiar words (e.g., Zangl
et al., 2005; Fernald et al., 2006)]. Once they have done this, they can then decide on and formulate
an answer. But they may take up to 2 s, or more, before they start their answer after a question.
The size of this gap between question and answer decreases over time for specific questiontypes (Casillas et al., under review), and by around 3;6–4;0, children often manage near-adult
timing.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

July 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 890 | 258

Clark and Lindsey

To date, studies of how children answer questions have
focussed on verbal answers, where children either repeat one
or more words from the adult question in their answer, or
construct a verbal answer from scratch. This suggests that one
factor in answering a question is how much word production
children have to plan in order to come up with an answer.
When they repeat a word from the adult’s question as the
answer, they need not retrieve anything from memory, so the cost
should be minimal. But when they have to retrieve one or more
appropriate words, and the relevant construction, from memory
before they begin to articulate their answer, the cost should be
much greater.
What happens, though, when children (or adults, come to
that), have the option of answering the question with a gesture,
either alone or in combination with speech? Once children have
decided on an answer, to extend hand and arm to designate a
place in answer to a Where question, or to select an alternative in
answer to a Which question, would seem to require less planning
and articulation than producing an utterance, where children
must first decide which words to repeat of those already said, say,
or else search for and retrieve one or more appropriate words and
then articulate those in their response.

Gestures in Young Children
Children start to produce manual gestures fairly early to
indicate interest in or desire for something in their immediate
environment. They start to point (interest: ‘look’) and reach
(desire: ‘I want’) from as early as 10–12 months. These two
gesture-types have been considered to be proto-speech acts for
asserting and requesting (Werner and Kaplan, 1963; Wundt,
1973; Bates et al., 1975; Bruner, 1975). The vast majority of
young children’s early gestures appear to be deictic in nature,
mainly index-finger POINTS, but they also produce gestures to
SHOW, OFFER, or PLACE objects for the other (see Caselli,
1990; Liszkowski, 2006; Andrén, 2010). In his case study of five
children up to age 2;6, Andrén (2010) found that these gestures
were nearly always (94%) coordinated with speech, with only a
few gestures overall occurring on their own (see also Kelly, 2014).
Children demonstrate comprehension as well as production
of POINTS from around 12 months on (e.g., Muñetón Ayala
and Rodrigo López, 2011; Behne et al., 2012). When adults
look and point, children treat this as a directive to look at
whatever is being targeted. In general, adult gaze and pointing are
critical in establishing joint attention (e.g., Carpenter et al., 1998;
Estigarribia and Clark, 2007).
By 1;6, children appear to use POINTS differentially: to elicit a
term for something, they simply point and look, and adults then
typically offer a label for that referent. But when children combine
a point with vocalization or a word, adults are significantly more
likely to treat that combination as a request and to give the child
the object targeted (see Carter, 1978; Kelly, 2011; Olson and
Masur, 2011).

Gestures and words in answers

compare gestural and verbal responses to adult Where and Which
questions addressed to one child between the ages 1;4 and 3;5.
To make this comparison, we examined the relative timing of
any gesture onset in an answer, compared to the timing of any
vocal or verbal onset in the answer. Answers could take several
forms: (a) they could be simple, containing just a single responseelement: a gesture, a babble (vocalization), or a word—either a
word repeated from the adult question or a new verbal choice
made by the child; or (b) they could be complex, consisting of two
elements: a gesture + babble, gesture + repeat, gesture + newword(s), or repeat + new-word(s).
Since gestural responses do not require any lexical retrieval, we
expect that children should be able to produce a gestural response
as soon as they have understood the question. Producing a new
verbal response should be more complex and therefore take
more time: the child must retrieve any relevant word(s), plan
the answer, and then articulate it. So any measurable difference
between gestural and verbal response times would provide a
preliminary indication of question-comprehension time (how
long it takes to issue a gesture) and hence how much time is
required to produce a verbal response.
If the child produced a gesture in a combined gesture + verbal
response, with the gesture produced ahead of the child’s word(s),
this would be evidence that the child knows what to answer but
needs additional time to retrieve relevant words. The conceptual
cost of identifying a relevant answer is the same for gestural and
verbal responses. But for verbal responses, lexical retrieval is one
bottleneck in the timing of an answer, followed by planning the
response and articulation (Levelt, 1989; Levinson, 2000, 2006).
We would therefore expect that repeats of one or more words
from the adult question, available in short-term memory, should
take less time than when the child constructs an answer with
words newly retrieved from memory. In short, both lexical
retrieval and articulation are added costs and so should take
longer, as shown schematically in Table 1. In the present case
study we focus on the processing costs in the production of verbal
responses compared to gestural ones.

Materials and Methods
For this study, we drew on the corpus for one child, Alex, from the
Providence Corpus of American English (Demuth et al., 2006), in
the Child Language Data Exchange System archive (CHILDES;
MacWhinney, 2000). All data in the CHILDES Archive were
collected in accordance with the internal review board on human
subjects of the relevant university, with permission for use
of the data in further analyses by researchers not involved

TABLE 1 | Costs (effort) required in answering a question.
Lexical retrieval

Articulation
–
√
( )
√

Where and Which Questions

Gesture

–

When young children answer questions, they may substitute an
indicating gesture for speech, for example answering a where
question with a POINT to the relevant location. In this study, we

Babble

–

Repeated word(s)

–
√

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

New word(s)

√

July 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 890 | 259

Clark and Lindsey

in the original study. This corpus contains high-quality video
recordings of biweekly spontaneous interactions, each lasting 1–
1.5 h, between parent and child. Each video session contains
numerous parental questions and child answers. This allowed us
to measure both gestural and verbal onset times in the child’s
responses to parental questions. Recordings for Alex were made
approximately every 2 weeks, beginning at age 1;4.20 until 3;5.15,
for a total of 51 video sessions. For our analysis, we chose
26 of these sessions, one per month, to capture snapshots of
Alex’s development. If any particular month had fewer than 10
tokens of the relevant question–answer types, and if there was
an additional video available in that month, we drew on both
video sessions. We did this for nine sessions—at 1;7, 1;11, 2;2,
2;3, 2;8, 2;10, 3;1, 3;2, and 3;4—so each of these months was
represented by two data sessions from Alex, for a total of 35
videos in all.
In order to analyze the time it took for the child to answer his
mother’s questions, we compared gestural and verbal responses.
Gestural responses offer a non-verbal form of response that
avoids the need to find appropriate words, while verbal responses
require finding and producing an appropriate answer. Where
and Which questions can be answered with either a gestural or
verbal response, or both. We extracted all Where and Which
questions, and measured the onset times of all responses provided
by the child. We identified a total of 502 Where and Which
questions in the 35 videos selected, and then identified all
the responses given. The adult (mother) in each case treated
the child’s responses as answers to the question just asked.
Moreover, the majority of these responses explicitly provided
relevant semantic information: a target-place in response to
Where questions, and a chosen alternative in response to Which
questions. The one response-type we were unable to assess was
vocal babble on its own: these babbles were consistent in form
but, to us, uninterpretable. His mother, however, treated these too
as appropriate responses.

Coding
We coded all the child responses using the following categories:
(i) gesture: manual gesture (G) to the target object’s location,
(ii) speech: babble (B), repeat of a term from the adult question
(R), new verbal response (V), and (iii) location: on camera or off
camera (O). We also coded as ‘no response’ (N) any questions
the child failed to answer, questions where the child was impeded
from responding (i.e., while eating, or with a body position
that delayed a possible gestural response), and questions asked
when the child was already manipulating, or speaking about, the
relevant object.
We collected metadata for each question/response pair,
including: (i) age of child, (ii) video file, (iii) timestamp for that
question in the video session (HH:MM:SS), (iv) question type
(Where or Which), (v) the adult’s actual question, and (vi) the
content of the child’s response. Next, we used a Python script to
extract 12 s of audio/video for each of the 502 questions we had
identified, beginning 2 s before each question onset. Each video
clip was imported into ELAN and paired with a synchronized
transcription file. The onsets and endings of all questions, and of
all answers (gestural and verbal) were transcribed into question,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Gestures and words in answers

gestural, and verbal tiers, respectively. Adult Where and Which
questions received 235 (47%) unimpeded gestural and/or verbal
responses from the child.
We then measured, in milliseconds, the time from the ending
of each question to the onset of the answer. Question endings
were marked following complete expulsion of sound, including
aspiration. Verbal onsets were marked immediately prior to any
vocal utterance (including utterance-initial “um”). Gesture onsets
were marked immediately prior to the beginning of movement
(the preparation of the gesture), and duration of the stroke was
also measured where possible. In the nine instances where a
question was repeated multiple times, we used our discretion in
determining which instance the child was attending to. Lastly, we
excluded outlier responses that were two SDs or more from the
relevant mean (13 answers, 5.5%) from our statistical analyses.
The timing of 10% of Alex’s responses to Where and Which
questions was rechecked by an independent coder. This coder
and the second author agreed on the timing measurements,
within 200 ms (the smallest discriminable difference) 88% of
the time, with high inter-rater reliability (Pearson’s r = 0.930,
p < 0.0001). When the timing window was expanded to within
400 ms, the agreement rate rose only very slightly, to 91%.

Results
Of these 221 questions included in our statistical analyses,
Where questions received 137 responses, and Which questions
84 responses. ‘Single’, simple, responses followed 145 (66%), and
‘double’, complex, responses followed 76 (34%). In the double
responses, we measured the onset timing for each element
separately (76 × 2). The single or simple responses consisted
of one element in the response. There were 14 gestures, 13
babbles, 56 repeats, and 62 new-word responses (i.e., words
retrieved specifically for the response given), as shown in Table 3.
Double or complex responses consisted of those where the child
combined a gesture with a vocalization or word, or combined a
repeat from the adult’s question with some added verbal material.
These combinations were ordered, with 10 gesture + babble
responses, 7 gesture + repeated word, 39 gesture + new-word,
and 2 repeated word + new-word responses, along with another
18 other complex answers where the second element seemed to
be produced for added clarification rather than being an integral
part of the initial response. In these cases, Alex produced an
indicating gesture after saying a repeated or new word. In seven
instances, he babbled and then, after a pause, pointed; in five
more, he repeated a word from the question, and only then
pointed; and in another five, he produced a new word and then
pointed. In each instance, Alex appeared to be trying to clarify
his answer by adding the gesture afterward (see Table 4, righthand columns). And in one, he produced a one-word answer,
paused, and then repeated a word from the adult question.
We therefore excluded the timing for these from our overall
computations of the relative timing of the two parts in double
responses.
In all, we measured 297 response tokens (145 tokens from the
simple responses, and 152 tokens from the 76 complex, double

July 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 890 | 260

Clark and Lindsey

Gestures and words in answers

responses). The overall mean response times, from the end of
the question to the onset of the child’s answer, are summarized
in Table 2.
Overall, Alex’s gestures were produced faster than his babble
responses. His babbles, repeats of adult words, and newword responses differed significantly overall [F(3,259) = 9.355,
p < 0.0001], with babbles and repeats both produced significantly
faster than new-word responses (Table 2). His gestures were
faster than both repeated word responses (Fisher’s Least
Significant Difference test, p < 0.021), and new-word responses
(Fisher’s LSD, p < 0.0001). And his repeated word responses
in turn were significantly faster than his new-word responses
(Fisher’s LSD, p < 0.009). Finally, within his complex double
responses (Table 4), his gestures were significantly faster than the
verbal responses they were paired with, where the gesture onset
preceded the word onset [t(56) = 7.408, p < 0.0001].
Although we combined the responses to Where and Which
questions in the overall analysis, inspection of the two questions
and their responses separately showed the same patterns in onset
timing for the response types: Gestures (Where 598 ms, Which
379 ms) were produced faster than any verbal responses. Among
verbal responses, babbles and repeats (Where 1056, 753; Which
580, 353) were faster than new-word responses (Where 1103;
Which 848), and repeats in turn were faster than new-word
responses.
When we compare these response-types in single responses
(Table 3) to double responses (Table 4), we see that the mean
onset timing for gestures and verbal responses varies with the
complexity of the answer. It also varies for verbal responses,
whether the child repeats one or more of the words he has just
heard, combines one or more repeated words with a word newly
retrieved from memory, or constructs a verbal response of one to
three or more words that are entirely new. Although responses
to some question-types get faster with age (Casillas et al., under
review), such gains are often obscured by the fact that, as children
get older, they also start to produce some longer, more complex
answers where earlier they had produced only one word.
The single gesture responses consistently indicated the
location in response to Where, and the alternative-chosen in

TABLE 2 | Mean response times (in milliseconds) for all response-types.
Response-type

N

Time to response onset
504

Gesture

70

Babble

23

725

Repeat

65

717

New word

103

957

TABLE 3 | Mean response times (in milliseconds) for single
response-types.
Response-type

N

Time to response onset

Gesture

14

788

Babble

13

685

Repeat

56

678

New-word

62

950

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

response to Which. Babbles, produced on their own and in some
double responses, may have had some attention-getting function,
especially when combined with a pointing gesture. On their own,
they appear to have been interpretable to the mother as early
attempts at words: she treated them all as responses. The verbal
elements in single responses consisted either of one or more
words repeated from the adult question (n = 56)—typically the
word for the object being sought (Where?) or for the object
chosen (Which?)—or of semantically relevant unmentioned
words retrieved by the child from memory (n = 62). Initially,
Alex tended to repeat words, mainly single words, from the adult
question (e.g., papa, balloon, etc.), but as he got older, he also
began to produce deictic terms like there or that, either on their
own or in combination with repeated or newly retrieved words.
His verbal responses also became longer with age, and by 2;4–
2;6, he produced some answers of three words or more [e.g.,
Which shoes, the green ones? —The green ones (2;6); Where
would you like to sit, right here? —Over there (2;8); Where’s the
baby going? —Baby go in a stroller to go for a walk (3;0); Which
one would you like to paint? —I would like to paint this one
(3;1)].
Does planning a longer verbal response take longer? We
looked at the correlations with age for Alex’s responses (a) where
he repeated one vs. two vs. three or more words from the adult
question, and (b) where he produced one vs. two vs. three or
more words retrieved from memory. In the first case, where he
had just heard the word(s) he repeated in the adult’s question,
there was no change with age, whether he repeated 1, 2, or 3+
words (r = 0.085, n.s.), but when Alex constructed his answer
with his own words, he produced a larger number of more
complex (longer) utterances as he got older (r = 0.225, p < 0.043).
We also looked, within his single responses, at how long he
took to produce 1–, 2–, and 3+ word answers. On average,
longer answers took longer to produce for both repeats and
new-word responses, as shown in Table 5. However, there was
effectively no correlation between length-of-response and timing
here, largely because both repeats (r = 0.108, n.s.) and new words
(r = 0.149, p < 0.065, n.s.) displayed wide variance in timing with
production of utterances of the same length. This is attributable
to extraneous factors such as how well the child was actually
attending when the adult issued the question, whether he could
remember immediately where something was, and his basis for
deciding which alternative to choose.
As children get older, they get better at planning and better
at articulating words and sequences of words, so they can
produce longer answers. But they should also gradually speed
up, perhaps doing so more readily when they repeat words
from the adult question than when they construct an entirely
new answer themselves. This would initially yield the different
means for responses where Alex repeated one or more words
from the adult question, compared to where he constructed a
new answer with words retrieved from memory (see Table 5).
As Casillas et al. (under review) noted, young children do get
faster at answering yes/no questions as they get older. However,
children’s increasing speed in answering Wh-questions is often
obscured by their ongoing acquisition of different Wh-words,
and the added planning needed to answer Wh-questions, as

July 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 890 | 261

Clark and Lindsey

Gestures and words in answers

TABLE 4 | Mean response times (in milliseconds) for double response-types, with the basic order of the two elements produced.
Response-type

N

Time-1

Time-2

Response-type

N

Time-1

Time-2

Gesture + Babble

10

258

778

Babble + Gesture

5

553

678

Gesture + Repeat

7

567

916

Repeat + Gesture

7

805

984

Gesture + New-word

39

454

919

New-word + Gesture

5

784

1422

Repeat + New-word

2

1101

1919

New-word + Repeat

1

546

1209

children master the meaning of each Wh–type in turn. Of
Where and Which, Where is typically acquired first (ErvinTripp, 1970; Tyack and Ingram, 1977), and Alex answered Where
questions almost twice as often as Which (137 to 84). However,
we did not have enough data to detect any changes in speed
for Alex’s answers to these Wh- questions over time, as he got
older.

Discussion
We analyzed the response times for all answer-types and, as
expected, found that Alex’s gestures were produced the fastest
overall. This finding is consistent with our expectation that both
word-retrieval and articulation add costs to responding. Young
children struggle to retrieve words from memory, and also have
a hard time producing words in recognizable form. When we
limited our analysis to his verbal responses, we found that Alex
took less time overall when he relied on one or more words
repeated from the adult’s question than verbal responses when
he retrieved and produced specific words of his own. Here too,
we see a cost for word-retrieval, as against simply repeating
words available in short term memory. In double answers, Alex
generally produced gestures ahead of words, suggesting that he
typically knew what he wanted to answer, but needed time both
to retrieve words and to articulate them. In short, word retrieval is
one bottleneck in the timing of responses: it adds to the planning
cost required in answering a question.

Recognizing and Retrieving Words
Children get better at recognizing familiar words as they get
older. They speed up steadily from 15 to 24 months, at which time
they come close to achieving adult speed in recognizing familiar
words (see Fernald et al., 2006, 2013; Fernald and Marchman,
2012). They also steadily improve in recognizing partial words,
and in processing words that have been mispronounced (e.g.,
Swingley and Aslin, 2000; Swingley, 2009).
Recognizing familiar words, though, is a rather different
matter from retrieving those words and producing them in order
to answer a question. During their second year, as children’s
production vocabularies begin to expand, they make numerous
errors in production, often retrieving the wrong word. Dapretto
and Bjork (2000) found that children between 14 and 24 months
with larger vocabularies were more likely to be able to retrieve
the appropriate words for objects that had been hidden in a
box, and that with pictures as prompts they could generally
retrieve the appropriate words. They also found that retrieval
errors were very frequent in naturalistic picture-book reading,
for those children whose production vocabulary had just begun

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

to increase, compared to those who still had only a very small
vocabulary or those with a relatively large vocabulary toward
the end of the second year. Retrieving the right words early on,
then, gives young children much more difficulty than recognizing
words they hear from others. This is consistent with the general
advance of comprehension over production (see Clark and
Hecht, 1983).
But in order to answer questions, children need to be able to
retrieve the right words. This in turn depends on their having
already made the appropriate mapping as they linked forms
and (preliminary) word meanings so they could recognize those
words from others—for comprehension. This first step is essential
for children trying to retrieve the relevant or most appropriate
word(s) for production. Question-answering depends on both
comprehension and production, with comprehension of the
question followed up by (a) the idea of a possible answer, and
(b) its instantiation as a gesture, as an utterance, or as some
combination of the two (see Tables 3 and 4). But responding
with an utterance requires that children be able to retrieve any
pertinent words and, if necessary, combine two or more words in
a syntactic construction, for subsequent articulation.

What Role does Articulation Play?
In learning how to produce a word, children need to produce
it in a form that is recognizable to the addressee, but that may
take quite a long time to achieve. Children’s early attempts at
words often fail because they do not produce a recognizable
word and because they produce different variants each time they
try to say that word (see, e.g., Dromi, 1987). This, of course,
makes it harder for adults to recognize what the child is trying
to say. At the same time, if children produce consistent word
forms, as when children rely on idiosyncratic templates (e.g.,
/babiNk/ for ‘blanket’), even if these fail to match the adult targets,
adults can generally understand what the children intend. But
children continually monitor and fine-tune their production,
eventually matching the conventional forms produced in the
speech community around them. One way to characterize their
articulatory development is in the form of two ‘rules’ for early

TABLE 5 | Alex’s response length in words and timing in milliseconds.
Repeats

New words

Length

N

msecs

Length

N

msecs

1 word

41

669

1 word

38

867

2 words

16

752

2 words

39

877

3+ words

6

818

3+ words

28

1109

July 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 890 | 262

Clark and Lindsey

word production, Be consistent and Be precise (McAllister Byun
et al., 2016). The former allows for recognition by others, across
different contexts, of words articulated in a non-standard way,
and the latter captures the fact that children try hard to emulate
the conventional forms they hear from adults. Learning how
to articulate single words and then sequences of two or more
words takes effort, and acquiring the adult pronunciations takes
time (Stoel-Gammon, 2011). In short, articulating any kind of
verbal response to a question takes time, over and above the time
needed to retrieve words from memory. Planning a response,
from deciding on an appropriate conceptual answer, to finding
the words and organizing them into an appropriate construction,
to articulating the relevant utterance, all takes time (Levelt, 1989;
see also Levinson, 2006).
Finally, in relying on gestures alone and on gestures along
with some speech, children are following adult usage. When
adults take turns, and, for example, ask and answer questions,
they can do this using speech or gesture, or both (Clark, 2012).
And gestures are often used in interaction to identify the place
of some target referent, along with a description, or in lieu
of a description (e.g., Bangerter and Oppenheimer, 2006; de
Ruiter et al., 2012). In short, gestures alone can serve as turns;
they can also be combined with speech. We have made use
of this usage in young children in order to unpack some of
the steps involved in identifying and then planning a verbal
answer.

From Answering Questions to Turn-Taking and
Interaction
Turn taking is fundamental in human interaction. Even in
infancy, babies respond to parental talk and gaze, initially with
extensive overlapping with adult speech in their vocalizations
(e.g., Ginsburg and Kilbourne, 1988; Van Egeren et al., 2001).
As infants get older, they produce fewer overlaps and more
turn-like interactions using gaze, babble, and early word forms
(e.g., Rutter and Durkin, 1987; D’Odorici et al., 1997; Hilbrink
et al., 2014). But the gaps they leave between turns are
often too long. Once they start to use words in their own
turns, young children become more adept at anticipating
who will talk next when watching an ongoing conversation
and they look to the next speaker at appropriate turnswitch points (see Casillas and Frank, under review). But
being able to track what is happening in a conversation

References
Andrén, M. (2010). Children’s Gestures from 18 to 30 Months. Centre for Languages
and Literature, Vol. 50. Lund: Lunds Universitet.
Arnon, I., Casillas, M., Kurumada, C., and Estigarribia, B. (eds). (2014).
Language in Interaction: Studies in Honor of Eve V. Clark. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Bangerter, A., and Oppenheimer, D. (2006). Accuracy in detecting referents
of pointing gestures unaccompanied by language. Gesture 6, 85–102. doi:
10.1075/gest.6.1.05ban
Bates, E., Camaioni, L., and Volterra, V. (1975). The acquisition of performatives
prior to speech. Merrill Palmer Q. 21, 205–226.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Gestures and words in answers

between third parties is just part of managing interaction.
Children also have to learn to take turns on time for
themselves.
When people ask questions, they expect to hear answers in the
next turn, and the median gap between question and answer for
yes/no questions in English for adults is around 200 ms (Stivers
et al., 2009). But at age one and two, children take considerably
longer in producing their answers, although they slowly speed
up over the next few years (Casillas et al., under review). And
although they get faster in answering simple yes/no questions,
tracking their increase in speed with age is complicated by the
fact that they are simultaneously adding new Wh-question words
(e.g., who, how, when, etc.) to their repertoire, and learning how
to answer each question type. Yet they clearly know, by age two
if not earlier, that they are expected to answer as soon as they
can. At this point, they begin to produce floor-holders like um, or
start an utterance and keep repeating the first word (e.g., That–
that– that–. . .) until they have their full answer ready (Casillas,
2014b).
Turn-taking is a skill fundamental to language use: it is critical
for coordinating with others, whether to exchange greetings,
answer questions, exchange information, collaborate in all sorts
of activities, or co-construct a story. While some form of turntaking, with attention to gaze, for example, first emerges during
infancy, it is only once children produce recognizable words that
they begin to participate in conversational exchanges, and begin
trying to observe the adult’s ‘No gap, no overlap’ pattern of taking
turns.
Indeed, turn-taking is central to all conversational interaction:
it relies on gaze and gesture as well as on the child’s utterances.
Examining different aspects of turn-taking and, in particular, how
children answer different question-types, allows us to take a closer
look at how children make use of what they know about both
language and interaction so far (Arnon et al., 2014; Grüter and
Paradis, 2014). They not only learn language in interaction, but,
in interacting, display what they already know and how readily
they can process it for production.

Acknowledgments
The preparation of this paper was supported in part by a Stanford
Graduate Fellowship to Kate L. Lindsey. We thank Tristan K.
Breeden and Rob F. Voigt for help with the data analysis.

Behne, T., Liszkowski, U., Carpenter, M., and Tomasello, M. (2012). Twelvemonth-olds’ comprehension and production of pointing. Br. J. Dev. Psychol. 30,
359–375. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02043.x
Bruner, J. S. (1975). The ontogenesis of speech acts. J. Child Lang. 2, 1–20. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900000866
Carpenter, M., Nagell, K., and Tomasello, M. (1998). Social cognition, joint
attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monogr.
Soc. Res. Child Dev. 63, [Serial No. 255]. doi: 10.2307/1166214
Carter, A. L. (1978). “From sensori-motor vocalizations to words: a case study
of the evolution of attention-directing communication on the second year,” in
Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language, ed. A. Lock (London:
Academic Press), 309–349.

July 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 890 | 263

Clark and Lindsey

Caselli, M. C. (1990). “Communicative gestures and first words,” in From Gesture to
Language in Hearing and Deaf Children, eds V. Volterra and C. J. Erting (Berlin:
Springer), 56–67. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-74859-2_6
Casillas, M. (2014a). “Taking the floor on time: delay and deferral in children’s
turn taking,” in Language in Interaction: Studies in Honor of Eve V. Clark, eds I.
Arnon, M. Casillas, C. Kurumada, and B. Estigarribia (Amsterdam: Benjamins),
101–114.
Casillas, M. (2014b). “Turn-taking,” in Pragmatic Development in First Language
Acquisition, ed. D. Matthews (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 53–70.
Clark, E. V., and Hecht, B. F. (1983). Comprehension, production,
and language acquisition. Ann. Rev. Psychol. 34, 325–349. doi:
10.1146/annurev.ps.34.020183.001545
Clark, H. H. (2012). “Wordless questions, wordless answers,” in Questions: Formal,
Functional and Interactional Perspectives, ed. J. P. de Ruiter (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 81–100. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781139045414.006
Dapretto, M., and Bjork, E. L. (2000). The development of word retrieval abilities
in the second year and its relation to early vocabulary growth. Child Dev. 71,
635–648. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00172
Demuth, K., Culbertson, J., and Alter, J. (2006). Word-minimality, epenthesis
and coda licensing in the early acquisition of English. Lang. Speech 49(Pt 2),
137–174. doi: 10.1177/00238309060490020201
de Ruiter, J. P., Bangerter, A., and Dings, P. (2012). The interplay between
gesture and speech in the production of referring expressions: investigating
the trade-off hypothesis. Top. Cogn. Sci. 4, 232–248. doi: 10.1111/j.17568765.2012.01183.x
D’Odorici, L., Cassibba, R., and Salerni, N. (1997). Temporal relationships
between gaze and vocal behavior in prelinguistic and linguistic communication.
J. Psycholinguist. Res. 26, 539–556. doi: 10.1023/A:1025027830861
Dromi, E. (1987). Early Lexical Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ervin-Tripp, S. (1970). “Discourse agreement: how children answer questions,” in
Cognition and the Development of Language, ed. J. R. Hayes (New York, NY:
Wiley), 79–107.
Estigarribia, B., and Clark, E. V. (2007). Getting and maintaining attention in talk
to young children. J. Child Lang. 34, 349–371. doi: 10.1017/S0305000907008161
Fernald, A., and Marchman, V. A. (2012). Individual differences in lexical
processing at 18 months predict vocabulary growth in typically developing
and late-talking toddlers. Child Dev. 83, 203–222. doi: 10.1111/j.14678624.2011.01692.x
Fernald, A., Marchman, V. A., and Weisleder, A. (2013). SES differences in
language processing skill and vocabulary are evident at 18 months. Dev. Sci.
16, 234–248. doi: 10.1111/desc.12019
Fernald, A., Perfors, A., and Marchman, V. A. (2006). Picking up speed in
understanding: speech processing efficiency and vocabulary growth across the
2nd year. Dev. Psychol. 42, 98–116. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.42.1.98
Ginsburg, G. P., and Kilbourne, B. K. (1988). Emergence of vocal alternation
in mother-infant interchanges. J. Child Lang. 15, 2221–2235. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900012344
Grüter, T., and Paradis, J. (eds). (2014). Input and Experience in Bilingual
Development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hilbrink, E., Gattis, M., and Levinson, S. C. (2014). Turn-taking and its timing in
infancy: a longitudinal study. Talk presented at the 4th International Conference
on Conversation Analysis (ICCA14). Los Angeles, CA.
Kelly, B. F. (2011). “A new look at redundancy in children’s gesture and word
combinations,” in Experience, Variation, and Generalization: Learning a First
Language, eds I. Arnon and E. V. Clark (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 73–90.
doi: 10.1075/tilar.7.05kel
Kelly, B. F. (2014). “Temporal synchrony in early multi-modal communication,”
in Language in Interaction: Studies in honor of Eve V. Clark, eds I. Arnon,
M. Casillas, C. Kurumada, and B. Estigarribia (Amsterdam: John Benjamins),
117–138.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Gestures and words in answers

Levinson, S. C. H. P. (2000). “Grice on location on Rossel Island,” in Proceedings of
the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, CA: UCB
Department of Linguistics, 210–224.
Levinson, S. C. (2006). “On the human interaction engine,” in Roots of Human
Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds N. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson
(Oxford: Berg), 39–69.
Liszkowski, U. (2006). “Infant pointing at 12 months: communicative goals,
motives, and social-cognitive abilities,” in Roots of Human Sociality: Culture,
Cognition, and Interaction, eds N. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson (Oxford: Berg),
153–178.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd Edn,
Vol. 2. The Database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
McAllister Byun, T., Inkelas, S., and Rose, Y. (2016). The a-map model: articulatory
reliability in child-specific phonology. Language (in press).
Muñetón Ayala, A. M., and Rodrigo López, M. J. (2011). Functions
of the pointing gesture in mothers and their 12- to 36-month-old
children during everyday activities. Spanish J. Psychol. 14, 619–629. doi:
10.5209/rev_SJOP.2011.v14.n2.10
Olson, J., and Masur, E. F. (2011). Infants’ gestures influence mothers’ provision
of object, action and internal state labels. J. Child Lang. 38, 1028–1054. doi:
10.1017/S0305000910000565
Rutter, D. R., and Durkin, K. (1987). Turn-taking in mother-infant interaction:
an examination of vocalizations and gaze. Dev. Psychol. 23, 54–61. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.23.1.54
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.09036
16106
Stoel-Gammon, C. (2011). Relationships between lexical and phonological
development in young children. J. Child Lang. 38, 1–34. doi:
10.1017/S0305000910000425
Swingley, D. (2009). Onsets and codas in 1.5-year-olds’ word recognition. J. Mem.
Lang. 60, 252–269. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2008.11.003
Swingley, D., and Aslin, R. N. (2000). Spoken word recognition and lexical
representation in very young children. Cognition 76, 147–166. doi:
10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00081-0
Tyack, D. L., and Ingram, D. (1977). Children’s production and conprehension
of questions. J. Child Lang. 4, 211–224. doi: 10.1017/S03050009000
01616
Van Egeren, L. A., Barratt, M. S., and Roach, M. A. (2001). Motherinfant responsiveness: timing, mutual regulation, and interactional
context.
Dev.
Psychol.
37,
684–697.
doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.
37.5.684
Werner, H., and Kaplan, B. (1963). Symbol Formation: An OrganismicDevelopmental Approach to Language and the Expression of Thought. New York,
NY: Wiley.
Wundt, W. (1973). The Language of Gestures. The Hague: Mouton. doi:
10.1515/9783110808285
Zangl, R., Klarman, L., Thal, D., Fernald, A., and Bates, E. (2005). Dynamics
of word comprehension in infancy: developments in timing, accuracy,
and resistance to acoustic degradation. J. Cogn. Dev. 6, 179–208. doi:
10.1207/s15327647jcd0602_2
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Clark and Lindsey. This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use,
distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal
is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

July 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 890 | 264

ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
published: 10 February 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00108

The use of intonation for turn anticipation in observed
conversations without visual signals as source of
information
Anne Keitel 1,2 * and Moritz M. Daum 2,3
1

Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Research Group ‘Infant Cognition and Action’, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
3
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
2

Edited by:
Judith Holler, Max Planck Institute
Psycholinguistics, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Marisa Casillas, Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Netherlands
Christine Fawcett, Uppsala
University, Sweden
*Correspondence:
Anne Keitel, Institute of
Neuroscience and Psychology,
University of Glasgow, 58 Hillhead
Street, Glasgow G12 8QB, UK
e-mail: anne.keitel@glasgow.ac.uk

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.
Keywords: turn-taking, conversations, intonation, visual cues, interaction, infants, adults, eye tracking

INTRODUCTION
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. The anticipation of the
next step is crucial for successful non-verbal interactions, for
example, in sport or musical performances, but also for successful
verbal interactions, that is, conversations. During a conversation,
a variety of cues such as content or prosody mark the end of one
speaker’s turn and the beginning of the next speaker’s turn. 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.
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

www.frontiersin.org

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). The use of lexicosyntactic content is highly related to language comprehension and
seems to be among the most important factors for detecting the
end of a turn. For example, 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. Participants reliably indicated an
expected end of a turn well before the turn was actually finished.
A follow-up study suggested that participants anticipated the
upcoming lexical content and used this information to estimate
the end of a turn (Magyari and de Ruiter, 2012). Accordingly,
adults not only accurately detect a turn boundary, they usually
anticipate it if they can rely on the spoken content.
Spoken language, however, not only includes semantic and
syntactic cues but is also accompanied by rich non-symbolic
information. Other linguistic information includes acoustically
marked prosodic boundary cues (Gerken, 1996) that involve

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 265

Keitel and Daum

intonation, syllable length, and pauses. The availability of these
cues helps to segment linguistic units even when information
about content is unavailable (Schaffer, 1983; de Ruiter et al., 2006;
Casillas and Frank, 2012). For example, when utterances are made
unintelligible, with only prosodic cues (notably intonation) still
intact, adults can identify the end and beginning of turns at above
chance level (Schaffer, 1983; de Ruiter et al., 2006). In the reverse
case, when utterances lack prosodic information, the ability to
recognize the end of a turn is similar to when the full repertoire
of information is available (de Ruiter et al., 2006). Thus, adults’
ability to detect an end of turn is not influenced by the availability
of intonation (de Ruiter et al., 2006). These findings have led to
the notion that adults primarily use prosody to predict the end of
a turn if semantic and syntactic information is lacking (Grosjean
and Hirt, 1996).
Visual information also contributes to turn taking in natural
adult conversation. This includes visual cues such as mouth opening before speech onset, language-accompanying body movements and gesture, as well as gaze (Thórisson, 2002). For example,
analyses of visual signals in conversations from a previous study
by Keitel et al. (2013) yielded results indicating that the speakers
opened their mouths on average 494.43 ms (SD = 228.48 ms)
before a verbal speech signal was audible. Thus, it is well possible
that visual cues support the detection of a turn. Taken together,
adults make use of a variety of cues to detect turns during conversations, of which lexico-syntactic content seems to play a major
role, and prosodic and visual information serve a supportive
function.
Early in life, when language skills are far from adult level,
children lack a substantial amount of the linguistic repertoire
required for identifying the end of a turn. Studies on language
development suggest that infants’ word comprehension starts
at around the age of 8 months and rapidly increases over the
next few months so that their productive vocabulary has reached
approximately 600 words by the age of 30 months (Fenson et al.,
1994). During this time, the child’s vocabulary not only increases
substantially, but their sentences also become more complex
(Clark, 2009). This development results in a rather sophisticated
understanding and application of syntactic schemes at around age
3.5–4 years (Tomasello, 2000).
Regarding the anticipation of turns, eye tracking studies have
shown that, with increasing language skills, children increasingly
anticipate turns in observed conversations. One of the first studies
that addressed this topic analyzed the gaze pattern of 1- and
3-year-old children during the observation of an everyday conversation between two speakers (von Hofsten et al., 2009). The
authors of the study analyzed whether the observing children
shifted their gaze to the next speaker before they started speaking.
These results showed that the anticipation of turns increased
significantly with age. Findings from similar eye tracking studies
have shown that 1- to 7-year-old children anticipate speaker
transitions in observed conversations effectively (Casillas and
Frank, 2012, 2013). Furthermore, and most importantly for the
present study, recent findings from Keitel et al. (2013) extended
these results with a reliability analysis of participants’ gaze shifts.
This analysis revealed that the anticipation of turns was reliable
only in 3-year-olds and adults. Younger children shifted their

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Intonation and visual signals in turn anticipation

gaze between speakers mostly independently of the turn-taking.
These findings suggest that children need a sophisticated level of
language understanding to anticipate conversations in a similar
manner to adults, which is acquired around the age of 3 years.
Early in life, prosodic cues serve particularly important functions in children’s language development. For example, prosody
helps 6-month-old infants to segment linguistic units, such as
clauses (Nazzi et al., 2000) and phrases (Soderstrom et al.,
2003). Furthermore, the prosodic cue intonation can already be
extracted from speech by newborns (Nazzi et al., 1998; Sambeth
et al., 2008). For the anticipation of turns in observed conversations, the role of intonation was investigated in the abovementioned study by Keitel et al. (2013). In this study, children
between 6 months and 3 years of age, as well as adults, saw
videos of two dyadic conversations. The auditory signal of the
conversations, in particular, intonation, was modulated. In one
condition intonation was kept normal; in a second condition
intonation was synthetically flattened. Interestingly, only the 3year-old children benefitted from the unmodified and available
intonation. Neither the adults nor the younger children showed
differences in their gaze behavior between the two conditions.
The lack of an intonation effect in younger children could be
due to the fact that they often shifted their gaze between speakers
unrelated to turn transitions. Nevertheless, intonation seems to
be important for 3-year-olds to anticipate the course of observed
conversations. However, a different study that investigated the role
of lexical and prosodic information on 1- to 7-year-old children’s
turn anticipation did not find this effect in 3-year-olds (Casillas
and Frank, 2013). Casillas and Frank (2012, 2013) additionally
differentiated between gaze shifts following questions or nonquestions and found an advantage for questions in older children
(beginning around 3–4 years). They conclude that children’s turn
anticipation relies on both lexical and prosodic information.
Thus, both studies, Keitel et al. (2013) and Casillas and Frank
(2013), suggest that children use both lexical and prosodic cues
to identify the end of turns. In contrast, studies with adults
have concluded that they predominantly rely on the information
provided by the lexical content (e.g., de Ruiter et al., 2006).
In the present study, we investigated the effect of the prosodic
cue intonation in children and adults while controlling for visual
cues (see also Casillas and Frank, 2013). During natural conversations between two human interaction partners, diverse visual
cues can indicate an upcoming turn transition. For example, the
mouth is usually opened before the actual stream of speech starts,
and small gestures can also indicate a desire to respond. To avoid
these visual cues entirely, we presented videos of conversations
between two puppets. The puppets did not move their bodies,
and the onset of the speech signal perfectly corresponded with
the onset of the visual signal (mouth opening). The same was true
for the offset of the acoustic and visual speech signals. Again, as
in the study by Keitel et al. (2013), intonation was either normal
or flattened. In addition to an adult control sample, we tested
children aged 1 year, just starting their first words, and children
aged 3 years, fluently using multi-phrasal utterances (von Hofsten
et al., 2009; Keitel et al., 2013). The aim of the current study
was to corroborate previous findings by Keitel et al. (2013) and
von Hofsten et al. (2009) while exploring the impact of missing

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 266

Keitel and Daum

Intonation and visual signals in turn anticipation

visual cues. Based on previous findings, we expected an increase
of turn anticipations with age and a beneficial effect of available
intonation at age 3.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
PARTICIPANTS

Seventy-two participants, 24 in each of the three age groups, were
included in the final analyses: 1-year-old children [15 female,
9 male; M(age) = 12 months 4 days, range = 11 months
16 days to 12 months 15 days], 3-year-old children [13 female,
11 male; M(age) = 36 months 0 days, range = 35 months
17 days to 36 months 15 days], and adults [11 female, 13 male;
M(age) = 23.5 years, range = 20–30 years]. Ten additional 1-yearolds and three additional 3-year-olds were tested but excluded
from analysis because they were inattentive towards the conversations and did not yield enough valid trials (see Data Analysis for
valid trials criteria). One additional adult participant was tested
but was excluded from data analysis due to a technical error.
Contact information of children was obtained from public birth
records from the city of Leipzig, Germany. Children received a
toy and adults received monetary compensation for their participation. The study was approved by a local ethics committee at
the University of Leipzig and conducted in accordance with the
Declaration of Helsinki.
APPARATUS AND STIMULI

Two different conversations between animal puppets were presented (see Figure 1A). The topics were recreational activities
(conversation A) and birthday plans (conversation B). Each consisted of 28 turns that were analyzed (i.e., 27 speaker switches, or
trials). The puppets first greeted the participants directly (these
turns were not included in the analyses). The number of questions and declarative sentences were identical for each actor and
conversation. The average length of speech and gaps differed only
by approximately 295 (i.e., 11.9%) and 28 ms (3.1%), respectively,
between conditions (see Table 1 for details of the conversations).
The average duration of gaps in our study is longer than in a
typical adult conversation (915 ms in our study vs. approximately
400–500 ms in other studies; see Heldner and Edlund, 2010). We
decided to use distinct gaps to give even the younger children
enough time to process them.
To create the conversations, audio tracks were recorded first.
Two female actors held the scripted conversations using normal,
adult-directed intonation and spoke the lines into a microphone.

Table 1 | Details of the two conversations. Number of analyzed speaker
transitions, mean number of words per turn, total duration of
conversations, mean duration of speech (i.e., mean duration of individual
turn utterances), and mean duration of inter-turn gaps.
Number of
analyzed
speaker
switches

Conversation A
Conversation B

27
27

www.frontiersin.org

Ø Words/
Turn

7.9
9.3

Duration (in seconds)

Total

Ø Speech

Ø Gaps

88.24
95.44

2.34
2.63

0.93
0.90

Subsequently, the conversations were acted out using hand puppets that could open and close their mouths independently from
the rest of the body. The audio recordings were played back during
the video recording of the puppets so that the actors could move
the puppet’s mouth synchronously with the speech signal. Audio
and video tracks were then combined using video editing software
(Edius). The tracks were arranged in a way that the movement of
the mouth started and finished at exactly the same time as the
speech. For both conversations, a second version was created with
flattened intonation (using the same procedure as in Keitel et al.,
2013). For the flattened intonation conversations, the variations
of the fundamental frequency (F0) were removed and averaged
to the mean frequency of the conversations using the software
Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2014). Via this procedure, the pitch
contour of the conversations was extracted and segmented into
pitch points at a rate of 100 Hz. The pitch points were removed,
and a new pitch contour was created with the average frequency of
the respective conversation using pitch synchronous overlap and
add (PSOLA) resynthesis. This resulted in clearly less intonated,
monotone speech (see Figure 1B for pitch properties). Thus, both
conversations A and B were available in the normal condition and
in the flattened condition.
The videos were presented on a 17-inch monitor (resolution:
800 × 600 pixels). They subtended a visual angle of 27.5° × 15.2°.
The participants sat at a distance of approximately 60 cm from
the monitor. Gaze was measured using a remote corneal reflection
eye tracker (Tobii 1750, Stockholm, Sweden, with infant addon; sampling rate: 50 Hz; precision: 1°; accuracy: 0.5°; software:
ClearView 2.7.1). The stereo audio signal was played back via two
speakers placed either side of the monitor.
PROCEDURE

The experimenter explained the procedure to the children and
their parents and to the adult participants; otherwise, participants
were naïve to the purpose of the study. Written informed consent
was obtained from the adult participants and from the children’s
parents. After the child had become accustomed to the experimenter, the experiment started. Each participant was tested individually; one parent was present during testing. A 9-point infant
calibration was used for all participants (this took approximately
30 s to 1 min) before the conversation videos were presented.
Each participant watched both conversations, A and B, one with
normal intonation and one with flattened intonation (this took
approximately 3.5 min). The order of the conversations and
the intonation were counterbalanced across participants. Before
each video presentation, an attention-grabbing video (including
interesting toys that moved and made sounds) was shown to the
participants to focus their attention on the monitor.
DATA ANALYSIS

Eye movement data were analyzed using the software Matlab
R2013b (The MathWorks). To detect gaze shifts towards speakers,
areas of interest (AOIs) were defined that covered each puppet’s
mouth and eyes (see white boxes in Figure 1A). For the two
speakers in conversation A, AOIs covered an area of 5.8° × 6.1°,
and 6.0° × 7.2° visual angle, respectively. In conversation B, AOIs

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 267

Keitel and Daum

FIGURE 1 | (A) Screenshots of the two presented conversations. The white
boxes illustrate areas of interest for the analysis of gaze shifts towards
speakers. (B) Pitch properties of the two conversations. Lines display the F0

covered an area of 5.1° × 5.5°, and 4.9° × 6.5° visual angle,
respectively.
Three measures were calculated to characterize participants’
gaze behavior. First, the exact time that gaze arrived at the next
speaker relative to the beginning of their turn was calculated (gaze
latency). A gaze shift towards the next speaker was considered to
be anticipatory when it had arrived at the speaker before they
had begun to speak, and reactive when it arrived after they had
started speaking. Positive values indicate an anticipatory gaze
shift; negative values indicate a reactive gaze shift. Second, we
analyzed the location and duration of fixations provided by the
data acquisition software (fixation duration; Keitel et al., 2014).
Fixation duration can indicate distraction. For example, shorter
fixation durations in the flattened condition could suggest that
participants were distracted by the unusual intonation. Third,
we calculated the occurrences of anticipatory and random gaze
shifts (occurrence rate; Keitel et al., 2013). Occurrence rates are
calculated as the number of gaze shifts during specific time
intervals. For anticipatory gaze shifts, these time intervals were
inter-turn gaps, including the final 500 ms prior to the end of a
turn. The direction of anticipatory gaze shifts was always towards
the (upcoming) speaker. For random gaze shifts, time intervals

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Intonation and visual signals in turn anticipation

contours of the normal conversations (left) and of the manipulated, flattened
conversations (right). Mean pitch and standard deviations (in Hz) are indicated
in the gray box.

included speech (minus the 500-ms gap at the end of a turn).
The direction of random gaze shifts was always away from the
speaker (see Keitel et al., 2013 for detailed illustration of time
intervals and direction of gaze shifts). Because occurrence rates
are calculated as the number of occurrences per time interval,
they can be interpreted as a probability to make a gaze shift. If the
probability to make anticipatory gaze shifts is statistically higher
than the probability to make random gaze shifts, turn anticipation
is considered reliable.
Gaze shifts towards a speaker were only regarded valid if they
were immediately preceded by a 100-ms fixation on the other
speaker. This limitation was included to ensure that a gaze shift
was related to the conversation and not random (Keitel et al.,
2013, 2014, see also Melzer et al., 2012).
To be included in the analyses, a participant had to show at
least 10 turn-taking-related gaze shifts (i.e., either anticipatory
or reactive) in each condition, out of the 27 possible trials. In
the group of 1-year-olds, children showed an average of 18.42
(SD = 4.72; normal condition), and 19.29 (SD = 4.20; flattened condition) valid trials, respectively. The 3-year-old children
showed an average of 20.88 (SD = 4.37; normal condition), and
21.46 (SD = 3.90; flattened condition) valid trials, respectively.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 268

Keitel and Daum

FIGURE 2 | Average gaze latency. (A) and fixation duration (B) in the normal
and flattened condition for all age groups. Error bars show standard error of
the mean. Circles illustrate individual values for each participant averaged over
both conditions. Asterisks indicate significant difference between conditions.

Adults showed an average of 24.75 (SD = 2.38; normal condition), and 24.71 (SD = 2.35; flattened condition) valid trials,
respectively. Paired t-tests with number of valid trials between
conditions did not suggest a difference for any age group (all
ps > 0.38, two-sided). The results presented below are the same
even with a simpler inclusion criterion—gazing at the screen at
least 50% of the time in total—so it is unlikely that our inclusion
criterion of 10 turn-taking-related gaze shifts introduced bias to
our findings.

RESULTS
GAZE LATENCY

Initial analyses did not suggest any main effect or interaction
effects of video order on gaze latency (all ps > 0.31), and data
were collapsed over this factor. In all age groups and conditions,
participants showed positive mean gaze latencies, which means,
on average, they anticipated turns (t-tests against zero; 1-yearolds: normal condition: t(23) = 9.40, p < 0.001; flattened condition: t(23) = 9.37, p < 0.001; 3-year-olds: normal condition:
t(23) = 5.53, p < 0.001; flattened condition: t(23) = 3.98,
p = 0.001; adults: normal condition: t(23) = 5.32, p < 0.001;
flattened condition: t(23) = 4.79, p < 0.001; see Figure 2A).
A 3 × 2 (age [1 year, 3 years, adults]) × condition [normal, flattened]) analysis of variance (ANOVA) with gaze latency
yielded significant main effects of age, F(2,69) = 9.52, p < 0.001,
η2G = 0.17, and condition, F(1,69) = 7.33, p = 0.009, η2G = 0.02,
and no significant interaction, F < 1 (generalized eta-squared
values are given to facilitate comparability with other studies, see
Olejnik and Algina, 2000; Bakeman, 2005). Bonferroni-corrected
post hoc t-tests showed that the 1-year-olds shifted their gaze
earlier than the 3-year-olds, p =0.001, and earlier than adults,
p = 0.001. There was no significant difference between the gaze
latencies of the 3-year-olds and the adults, p = 1. Following up
the effect of condition, paired t-tests showed that 3-year-olds,

www.frontiersin.org

Intonation and visual signals in turn anticipation

Time point zero on the y-axis in the left plot refers to the beginning of a turn in
the video. Positive values indicate that gaze arrived at the speaker before they
started speaking; negative values indicate that gaze arrived after they had
started speaking.

t(23) = 2.30, p = 0.03, d = 0.47, as well as adults, t(23) = 2.17,
p = 0.04, d = 0.44, displayed earlier gaze shifts in the normal than
in the flattened condition, whereas 1-year-olds did not show this
effect, t(23) = 0.47, p = 0.64, d = 0.10.
DISTRIBUTION AND DURATION OF FIXATIONS

Figure 3 illustrates the fixation distribution in conversation A for
both conditions (see Figure 2B for means of both conversations).
The example illustrates similarly focused fixations on the puppets’
faces in both conditions. A 3 × 2 (age × condition) ANOVA
with fixation duration yielded a significant main effect of age,
F(2,69) = 3.26, p = 0.045, η2G = 0.08, and no significant main
effect of, or interaction effect with, intonation (both F < 1; see
Figure 2B). Bonferroni-corrected post hoc t-tests showed that 3year-olds had marginally longer fixation durations than adults,
p =.06.
OCCURRENCE RATE OF ANTICIPATORY AND RANDOM GAZE SHIFTS

The occurrence probabilities, or occurrence rates (see Figure 4),
to make either anticipatory or random gaze shifts were entered
into a 3 × 2 [age (1 year, 3 years, adults) × occurrences
(anticipatory, random)] ANOVA. Results yielded main effects of
age, F(2,69) = 31.17, p < 0.001, η2G = 0.38, and occurrences,
F(1,69) = 116.07, p < 0.001, η2G = 0.20, and a significant interaction between both, F(2,69) = 15.06, p < 0.001, η2G = 0.06.
Bonferroni-corrected post hoc t-tests showed significant differences between 1-year-olds and both older age groups, both
p < 0.001, but not between 3-year-olds and adults, p = 0.51.
All age groups indicated larger occurrence rates for anticipatory
gaze shifts than for random gaze shifts, but this difference was
only significant in 3-year-olds, t(23) = 6.54, p < 0.001, d = 1.35,
and adults, t(23) = 11.40, p < 0.001, d = 2.33. The 1-year-olds
showed only marginally higher occurrence rates for anticipatory
gaze shifts, t(23) = 1.92, p = 0.07, d = 0.39. Moreover, the
rates for random gaze shifts decreased with age (all comparisons,

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 269

Keitel and Daum

Intonation and visual signals in turn anticipation

FIGURE 3 | Distribution of fixations in the normal and flattened condition (conversation A only) for all age groups. Each transparent dot displays a
fixation; its size indicates the fixation duration.

p < 0.005); the rates for anticipatory gaze shifts differed only
between 1-year-olds and older age groups, both p < 0.003, but
not between 3-year-olds and adults, p = 0.92.

DISCUSSION
CHILDREN’S AND ADULTS’ CUE USE FOR TURN ANTICIPATION

In the present study we investigated the effect of intonation on
turn anticipation during the observation of a dyadic conversation
while controlling the availability of visual cues. The main finding
was that 3-year-olds and adults anticipated more turns with

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

normal intonation than with flattened intonation, whereas 1year-olds did not show this effect. The effect of the children’s
data replicates previous findings that 3-year-olds but not 1-yearolds benefit from the additionally available intonation (Keitel
et al., 2013, but see Casillas and Frank, 2013). This was, as
in the earlier study, not caused by general differences in the
allocation of attention towards the conversation because fixation
durations did not differ between conditions. In line with previous
findings, we argue that at age 3, children have, on the one hand,
learned to use prosodic boundary cues to indicate higher level

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 270

Keitel and Daum

FIGURE 4 | Occurrence rates for anticipatory and random gaze shifts
for all age groups. Occurrence rates represent a probability to make a gaze
shift to the other speaker. Error bars show standard error of the mean.
Asterisks indicate significant difference between the rates for anticipatory
and random gaze shifts.

linguistic aspects (Männel and Friederici, 2011) but, on the other
hand, their overall language skills are not yet as sophisticated
as in adults (e.g., Clark, 2009). Accordingly, at age 3, the information provided by intonation effectively supports the perception of conversations and helps to anticipate a speaker’s next
turn.
The availability of the prosodic cue intonation yielded an
increase of turn anticipations also in the adult participants. Usually, during the observation of normal conversations, adults heavily rely on lexico-syntactic cues (de Ruiter et al., 2006; Magyari
and de Ruiter, 2012) and they only make use of prosodic cues
when lexico-syntactic information is lacking (Grosjean and Hirt,
1996). The present findings, however, indicate that adults’ cue
use is even more flexible: prosodic cues might be beneficial not
only with lacking lexico-syntactic cues but also with lacking visual
cues. This also gives rise to the assumption that adults naturally
use visual cues in conversations to detect a speaker’s intention to
respond. However, the lack of visual cues did not have a drastic
effect on participants’ turn anticipation, as, on average, they
anticipated an upcoming turn in both conditions. This supports
at least the assumption that visual cues are not mandatory for turn
anticipation.
EXCEPTIONAL TURN ANTICIPATION IN 1-YEAR-OLDS

A second, somewhat unexpected, finding was that 1-year-olds
anticipated more turns than older participants, independent of
condition. The distribution of individual means in Figure 2
illustrates that these results were not caused by outliers, but that
1-year-olds were consistently good at anticipating the course of
the conversations. However, the analysis of occurrence rates for
anticipatory and random gaze shifts helps to interpret this finding:
1-year-olds generally showed a higher probability for making
gaze shifts than 3-year-olds and adults. Importantly, there was

www.frontiersin.org

Intonation and visual signals in turn anticipation

no significant difference between the probabilities for making
random and anticipatory gaze shifts, which suggests that 1-yearolds’ turn anticipation was not yet reliable. Furthermore, the
probability of making random gaze shifts decreased significantly
with age. This finding suggests that younger children gazed back
and forth between the speakers much more often than older
children and adults. The histograms of gaze latencies (Figure 5)
illustrate that older participants’ gaze shifts to the next speaker
center around the turn onset, whereas 1-year-olds’ gaze shifts
to the next speaker are more evenly distributed over the whole
time interval. An appropriate interpretation of these findings
is that 1-year-olds shifted their gaze back and forth between
speakers for the whole duration of the conversation, and this
resulted in high probabilities of random and anticipatory gaze
shifts. These constant gaze shifts could, on the one hand, be due
to shorter attention spans in young children compared to older
children and adults. On the other hand, puppets could have been
particularly interesting for the 1-year-olds, resulting in keen visual
exploration.
ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY OF PUPPET CONVERSATIONS

The use of puppets as conversation partners in the present study
raises the question of ecological validity and the tendency to
generalize the present results to the “real world.” For human conversation partners, it is not possible to sit perfectly still or avoid
mouth opening prior to speaking, without seeming unnatural
or robotic. Therefore, the use of puppets to solve this problem
seems justified (see also Casillas and Frank, 2013). Furthermore,
studies have shown that young children and adults readily ascribe
human qualities to non-human agents, even if they consist of
geometrical shapes (Montgomery and Montgomery, 1999; Abell
et al., 2000). Puppets should therefore make it easy for observers
to immerse themselves in watching the conversations similar
to a human conversation. This assertion is supported by the
replication of results in 1- and 3-year-olds, compared with the
findings of Keitel et al. (2013). However, a little uncertainty
might remain that the adult findings are not due to the lack
of visual signals but to the use of puppets. But even if this
were the case, it would not affect the general conclusion of the
present study that available information in a conversation results
in differential cue use by adults. To partly resolve this issue,
further studies could use puppets as conversation partners and
include the typical lag between visual cues and the verbal speech
signal.

CONCLUSION
We investigated the effect of intonation on children’s and adults’
turn anticipation during the observation of dyadic conversations
between puppets. When visual cues were lacking, both adults and
3-year-olds benefitted from the availability of intonation. Considering that adults did not show an intonation effect when visual
cues were available (Keitel et al., 2013), this suggests that their
cue use is rather flexible, depending on available information.
Our results demonstrate further developmental differences in
the perception of conversations: one-year-olds showed generally
more gaze shifts when observing conversations than 3-year-olds
and adults, and did not yet anticipate turns reliably. One the

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 271

Keitel and Daum

FIGURE 5 | Histograms of anticipatory and reactive gaze shifts in the
normal (A) and flattened (B) condition for all age groups. Values during a
time interval with a white background illustrate anticipatory gaze shifts; values

one hand, this makes interpretations of their cue use for turn
anticipation difficult. On the other hand, a more fine-grained
investigation into 1-year-olds’ many “random” gaze shifts might
lead to a better understanding of the factors that influence their
perception of conversations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Hagen Lipka for data recovery and
Elizabeth Kelly for proofreading. Anne Keitel gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Graduate School “Function of Attention in Cognition,”
GRK 1182) and from the University of Leipzig (“Wiedereinstiegsstipendium”).

Frontiers in Psychology | Language Sciences

Intonation and visual signals in turn anticipation

during a time interval with a gray background illustrate reactive gaze shifts
(zero indicates beginning of turn). The dotted line in each plot displays the
average gaze latency in this age group/condition. Bin size is 250 ms.

REFERENCES
Abell, F., Happé, F., and Frith, U. (2000). Do triangles play tricks? Attribution of
mental states to animated shapes in normal and abnormal development. Cogn.
Dev. 15, 1–16. doi: 10.1016/S0885-2014(00)00014-9
Bakeman, R. (2005). Recommended effect size statistics for repeated measures
designs. Behav. Res. Methods 37, 379–384. doi: 10.3758/BF03192707
Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2014). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer program], Version 5.1.32. Retrieved from http://www.praat.org/
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2012). “Cues to turn boundary prediction in
adults and preschoolers,” in Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial): the 16th
Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, eds S. Brown-Schmidt, J.
Ginzburg, and S. Larsson (Paris: Université Paris-Diderot), 61–69.
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2013). “The development of predictive processes in
children’s discourse understanding,” in Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting
of the Cognitive Science Society, eds M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, and I.
Wachsmuth (Austin, TX: Cognitive Society), 299–304.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 272

Keitel and Daum

Clark, E. V. (2009). First Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
de Ruiter, J.-P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. J., Pethick, S. J., et al. (1994).
Variability in early communicative development. Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev.
59, i+iii–v+1–185. doi: 10.2307/1166093
Gerken, L. (1996). Prosody’s role in language acquisition and adult parsing. J.
Psycholinguist. Res. 25, 345–356. doi: 10.1007/BF01708577
Grosjean, F., and Hirt, C. (1996). Using prosody to predict the end of sentences in
English and French: normal and brain-damaged subjects. Lang. Cogn. Process.
11, 107–134. doi: 10.1080/016909696387231
Heldner, M., and Edlund, J. (2010). Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations. J.
Phon. 38, 555–568. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2010.08.002
Keitel, A., Prinz, W., and Daum, M. M. (2014). Perception of individual and
joint action in infants and adults. PLoS ONE 9:e107450. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107450
Keitel, A., Prinz, W., Friederici, A. F., von Hofsten, C., and Daum, M. M.
(2013). Perception of conversations—the importance of semantics and intonation in children’s development. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 16, 264–277. doi:
10.1016/j.jecp.2013.06.005
Magyari, L., and de Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.
00376
Männel, C., and Friederici, A. D. (2011). Intonational phrase structure processing
at different stages of syntax acquisition: ERP studies in 2-, 3-, and 6-year-old
children. Dev. Sci. 14, 786–798. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.01025.x
Melzer, A., Prinz, W., and Daum, M. M. (2012). Production and observation of
contralateral reaching: a close link by 12 months of age. Infant Behav. Dev. 35,
570–579. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2012.05.003
Montgomery, D. E., and Montgomery, D. A. (1999). The influence of movement
and outcome on young children’s attributions of intention. Br. J. Dev. Psychol.
17, 245–261.
Nazzi, T., Floccia, C., and Bertoncini, J. (1998). Discrimination of pitch contours by
neonates. Infant Behav. Dev. 21, 779–784. doi: 10.1016/S0163-6383(98)90044-3
Nazzi, T., Nelson, D. G., Jusczyk, P. W., and Jusczyk, A. M. (2000). Six-month-olds’
detection of clauses embedded in continuous speech: effects of prosodic wellformedness. Infancy 1, 123–147. doi: 10.1207/S15327078IN0101_11

www.frontiersin.org

Intonation and visual signals in turn anticipation

Olejnik, S., and Algina, J. (2000). Measures of effect size for comparative studies:
applications, interpretations, and limitations. Contemp. Educ. Psychol. 25, 241–
286. doi: 10.1006/ceps.2000.1040
Sambeth, A., Ruohio, K., Alku, P., Fellman, V., and Huotilainen, M. (2008). Sleeping
newborns extract prosody from continuous speech. Clin. Neurophysiol. 119,
332–341. doi: 10.1016/j.clinph.2007.09.144
Schaffer, D. B. (1983). The role of intonation as a cue to turn taking in conversation.
J. Phon. 11, 243–257.
Soderstrom, M., Seidl, A., Kemler Nelson, D. G., and Jusczyk, P. W. (2003). The
prosodic bootstrapping of phrases: evidence from prelinguistic infants. J. Mem.
Lang. 49, 249–267. doi: 10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00024-X
Thórisson, K. R. (2002). “Natural turn-raking needs no manual: computational
theory and model, from perception to action,” in Multimodality in Language
and Speech Systems, eds B. Granström, D. House, and I. Karlsson (Netherlands:
Springer), 173–207. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/
978-94-017-2367-1_8
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74, 209–253. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00069-4
von Hofsten, C., Uhlig, H., Adell, M., and Kochukhova, O. (2009). How children
with autism look at events. Res. Autism Spectr. Disord. 3, 556–569. doi: 10.1016/
j.rasd.2008.12.003
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Received: 17 September 2014; accepted: 21 January 2015; published online: 10
February 2015.
Citation: Keitel A and Daum MM (2015) The use of intonation for turn anticipation
in observed conversations without visual signals as source of information. Front.
Psychol. 6:108. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00108
This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in
Psychology.
Copyright © 2015 Keitel and Daum. This is an open-access article distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution
or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or
licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in
accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is
permitted which does not comply with these terms.

February 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 108 | 273

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 24 April 2015
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00495

Dutch and English toddlers’ use of
linguistic cues in predicting
upcoming turn transitions
Imme Lammertink 1*, Marisa Casillas 2 , Titia Benders 3 , Brechtje Post 4 and Paula Fikkert 1
1

Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2 Language and Cognition Department, Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 3 School of Psychology, Newcastle University, Newcastle, NSW,
Australia, 4 Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

Edited by:
Nuria Sebastian-Galles,
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Reviewed by:
Judit Gervain,
CNRS – Université Paris Descartes,
France
Jan P. De Ruiter,
Bielefeld University, Germany
*Correspondence:
Imme Lammertink,
Centre for Language Studies,
Radboud University, Erasmusplein 1,
6525 HT Nijmegen, Netherlands
immelammertink@gmail.com
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 01 December 2014
Accepted: 07 April 2015
Published: 24 April 2015
Citation:
Lammertink I, Casillas M, Benders T,
Post B and Fikkert P (2015) Dutch and
English toddlers’ use of linguistic cues
in predicting upcoming turn
transitions. Front. Psychol. 6:495.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00495

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Adults achieve successful coordination during conversation by using prosodic and
lexicosyntactic cues to predict upcoming changes in speakership. We examined the
relative weight of these linguistic cues in the prediction of upcoming turn structure
by toddlers learning Dutch (Experiment 1; N = 21) and British English (Experiment
2; N = 20) and adult control participants (Dutch: N = 16; English: N = 20). We
tracked participants’ anticipatory eye movements as they watched videos of dyadic
puppet conversation. We controlled the prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to turn
completion for a subset of the utterances in each conversation to create four types
of target utterances (fully incomplete, incomplete syntax, incomplete prosody, and
fully complete). All participants (Dutch and English toddlers and adults) used both
prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to anticipate upcoming speaker changes, but weighed
lexicosyntactic cues over prosodic ones when the two were pitted against each other.
The results suggest that Dutch and English toddlers are already nearly adult-like in their
use of prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues in anticipating upcoming turn transitions.
Keywords: turn prediction, prosody, lexicosyntax, child language, eye-tracking

Introduction
Speakers in conversation take turns at talking (Sacks et al., 1974). The timing of speaker transitions
is precise, usually exhibiting a 200 ms gap or a brief period of vocal overlap between turns (Stivers
et al., 2009). Considering that it takes approximately 600 ms to initiate speech production (based on
object naming; Levelt, 1989), addressees must anticipate when the current speaker’s turn will end
and must start planning their response well in advance to achieve minimal gap and minimal overlap
transition timing (Levinson, 2013). This process requires the addressee to perform multiple tasks
at once—decoding and interpreting the speech signal, plus formulating and articulating an appropriate response—all within the last few syllables of the ongoing turn (Levinson, 2013). Children,
whose linguistic skills are still developing, have a hard time accomplishing these multiple tasks for
turn-taking; it takes them several years before they master adult-like turn-taking behavior (age 6;
Casillas et al., in press; Ervin-Tripp, 1979; Garvey, 1984).
Despite their late mastery of turn-taking, children begin taking turns (of a sort) in infancy.
Caregivers respond to their 3–4-month-old infants’ vocalizations, movements, and vegetative sounds as if they were “turns” in proto conversation (Bruner, 1975; Snow, 1977; Ginsburg and Kilbourne, 1988). Twelve-month-olds already understand conversational patterns well
enough to expect speech (but not non-speech) sounds to provoke a verbal response from an
April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 274

Lammertink et al.

addressee (Thorgrímsson et al., 2015). One- and two-yearolds watching videos of conversation look anticipatorily to the
upcoming responder at points of turn transition (Casillas and
Frank, 2013). However, in their spontaneous turn-taking behavior, and in their predictions about upcoming turn boundaries,
children are generally slower and less accurate compared to
adults.
To anticipate upcoming turn structure accurately, children
must learn to use predictive information in the ongoing speech
signal. Recent experimental findings demonstrate that toddlers
use both lexicosyntactic and prosodic information to predict
upcoming speaker switches, but the relative importance of these
information sources for prediction remains largely undetermined
(Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013; Keitel et al., 2013; Keitel and
Daum, 2015). The current study investigates how Dutch and
English toddlers weigh lexicosyntactic and prosodic1 cues against
one another in their online prediction of upcoming speaker
switch.
Lexicosyntactic cues can provide critical information about
upcoming speaker switches. For example, incomplete syntactic
structures (“I’m making the. . . ”) hint that there is still more
information to come, frequent multi-word sequences or strong
semantic associations between words (“I need to brush my. . . ”)
can strongly indicate what exact words will come next, and the
word order of an utterance (interrogative vs. declarative) can help
listeners predict how the current turn will finish (and what will
happen in the next turn). Lexicosyntactic information appears
to be critical for adult turn-end prediction: listeners anticipate
turn-end timing more accurately when they can predict the
exact words that will make up the rest of the turn (Magyari
and de Ruiter, 2012). Speaker changes also almost always occur
at points of lexicosyntactic completion in task-oriented dialogs
(Dutch: Caspers, 2003; English: Ford and Thompson, 1996), and
lexical and syntactic cues to questionhood (e.g., wh-words and
subject-auxiliary inversion) occur early in the turn, thereby giving addressees more time to begin planning their response early
(Bögels et al., 2014).
At least one previous study suggests that lexicosyntactic information is more important than prosodic information in adults’
predictions about upcoming speaker changes. de Ruiter et al.
(2006) asked participants to listen to fragments of speech and to
press a button when they felt that the speaker’s turn was coming
to an end. Listeners achieved the same button press accuracy for
normal speech (with full linguistic information) and intonationally flattened speech (with lexicosyntax, rhythm, and intensity,
but no intonational information). In contrast, participants’ accuracy significantly decreased for low-pass filtered speech (with full
prosodic cues, but no lexicosyntactic information). The authors
took this result as evidence that lexicosyntactic cues are primary,
and possibly sufficient, for adult turn prediction, while prosodic
cues play a less important role.
1 The present study focuses on the role of intonation (one aspect of prosody) in children’s prediction of upcoming speaker switches. We designed the stimuli to control
for a few specific intonational contours. But, because we used a full, unfiltered linguistic signal, our intonational contours were accompanied by other prosodic cues
(e.g., duration and intensity). For this reason we adopt the broader term “prosody”
rather than the more narrow term “intonation.”

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

Other work has characterized lexicosyntactic and prosodic
cues as having qualitatively different functions for turn prediction. Under this view, lexicosyntax is particularly important in
assessing whether a turn is complete and, by extension, whether
it is ripe for a speaker switch. In natural speech, Dutch and
English listeners rarely expect speaker switches when lexicosyntactic information is incomplete, no matter what intonational
contour is used (Caspers, 2001; Wichmann and Caspers, 2001).
But, when speakers have multi-utterance turns, and the addressee
has to pass over several lexicosyntactically complete phrases
before reaching the true turn-end, lexicosyntax alone does not
provide sufficient information. Then prosody plays a critical role
in listeners’ ability to discriminate between potential completion
points and true completion points. Turn-ends are often accompanied by prosodic cues such as boundary tones, increased syllable length, and post-turn silence (Ford and Thompson, 1996).
Whether listeners expect a speaker change at lexicosyntactically
complete points is largely dependent on the prosodic cues in the
utterance (Caspers, 2001; Wichmann and Caspers, 2001).
The present paper addresses how children learn to use lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues in their prediction of upcoming turn structure. Generally speaking, children are sensitive to
prosodic information before they become sensitive to lexicosyntactic information. Newborn infants use prosodic cues to distinguish their native language from other languages (Nazzi et al.,
1998). Seven-month-olds can also use prosodic information to
distinguish between words spoken with an angry, happy, or neutral voice (Grossmann et al., 2005). By 10 months, they can also
use prosodic cues to segment the speech stream into smaller units
(Gleitman and Wanner, 1982; Jusczyk, 1997; Christophe et al.,
2008).
It is often assumed that children’s sensitivity to prosodic information bootstraps their sensitivity to lexicosyntactic information
(Morgan and Demuth, 1996; Christophe et al., 2008; Männel
and Friederici, 2010). Newborns can discriminate categories of
function words and content words on the basis of their different
prosodic characteristics (Shi et al., 1999). Children show sensitivity to the word order of their native language as young as 7–8
months of age on the basis of word frequency and prosody (Höhle
and Weissenborn, 2003; Gervain and Werker, 2013). Once children’s knowledge of lexicosyntactic information becomes more
detailed, they can access lexical and syntactic structures independently from the prosodic information available. For example,
children start to recognize distinct function words at 11 months
of age (Shi et al., 2006) and children at 12 months of age can use
differences in word order to distinguish between questions and
declaratives (Geffen and Mintz, 2014).
Given that sensitivity to prosodic cues precedes, or even bootstraps, sensitivity to lexicosyntactic cues, prosodic cues might
have an early and primary role in children’s predictions about
upcoming speaker change. But recent studies have only found
mixed evidence for this hypothesis. Casillas and Frank (2013)
showed videos of conversation to children and adults, finding
that children three and younger needed prosodic information
to make above-chance anticipatory gaze switches to upcoming
speakers in the video. In the same study, children three and
older did show more gaze switches for lexical-only stimuli than

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 275

Lammertink et al.

for prosody-only stimuli, but only for question-answer speaker
switches: in conditions where lexical information was available,
children made more anticipatory gaze switches after hearing
questions than non-questions. Their results suggest an early,
more global role of prosody in turn prediction and a later,
question-specific role of lexicosyntax. Importantly, the stimuli
in their experiment were phonetically manipulated to control
for linguistic information, e.g., using speech that was low-pass
filtered, intonationally flattened, duration-controlled, and multilayered (but see also Casillas and Frank, 2012). Children do not
often hear this kind of phonetically controlled speech in their
natural language environment.
Keitel et al. (2013); Keitel and Daum (2015) performed a similar study, showing children videos of conversation and using children’s age (rather than phonetic manipulation) to control for the
availability of lexicosyntactic cues; they tested both pre-verbal (6and 12-month-old) and verbal (24- and 36-month-old) children.
To test for the role of intonation, half of the videos featured pitchflattened speech and the other half featured a full linguistic signal.
Children only made above-chance anticipatory gaze switches to
the upcoming responder at 36 months—considerably later than
what Casillas and Frank (2013) found—and anticipated speaker
changes less often when intonational contours were removed (but
only at 36 months). In contrast, adults’ turn predictions were
unaffected by the lack of intonational contours. The findings indicate that intonation may be useful for children’s turn prediction,
but only at age three and up, and not for adults. But, again, the
primary linguistic control in the stimuli depended on phonetic
manipulation of the speech signal. Thus, the results of these prior
studies—Casillas and Frank (2013) and Keitel et al. (2013); Keitel
and Daum (2015)—are based on a comparison between natural
(full signal) and non-natural (phonetically manipulated) stimuli.
Unnatural speech is noticeable to children, and more generally
changes the way listeners process linguistic information. Twelveand 36-month-olds prefer speech sounds to non-speech (motor)
sounds while watching videos of conversation (Bakker et al.,
2011). If children in the studies mentioned above interpreted
the manipulated speech as degraded or even as non-speech, they
might have processed the lexicosyntactic and prosodic information differently than they do in everyday interactions. Even for
adults, acoustically unusual stimuli, such as synthetic speech, can
cause significant processing costs (Pisoni, 1981).
The current study is designed to assess the relative and the
individual contributions of prosody and lexicosyntax for turn
structure prediction while using the full speech signal (unfiltered
speech with both lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues present). We
used a full speech signal so that we could test children’s use of
linguistic cues for speaker-switch prediction with stimuli that
resemble speech in their natural environment—stimuli without
any phonetic filtering or resynthesis. Participants watched eight
videos of short, scripted conversation. For a subset of the utterances in each conversation, we controlled for the presence of
lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues to turn completion by crosssplicing snippets from multiple sentence recordings (see Section Stimulus Preparation). In one condition, both lexicosyntax
and prosody signaled an upcoming speaker switch (a fully complete turn). In the opposite condition, neither cue signaled an

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

upcoming speaker switch (a fully incomplete turn). In two more
conditions, lexicosyntax, and prosody were pitted against each
other to test for their relative primacy (i.e., complete lexicosyntax
with incomplete prosody or incomplete lexicosyntax with complete prosody). We expected that young children would rely more
on prosodic cues in their prediction of upcoming turn structure,
given their early acquisition of basic prosodic knowledge.
Following recent work, we measured children’s predictions
about upcoming turn structure by tracking their eye movements
while they watched videos of dyadic conversation between puppets. In line with previous studies investigating children’s anticipation of turn structure (Casillas and Frank, 2013; Keitel and
Daum, 2015), we used puppet dyads to capture children’s attention while also conveniently removing the non-verbal cues to
turn taking that often appear at turn boundaries (e.g., gaze and
gesture; Rossano et al., 2009; Stivers and Rossano, 2010). The
absence of non-verbal cues enabled us to focus on the role of
linguistic cues.
Eye tracking is a natural and passive measure of attention,
but provides an online measure of children’s predictive processing during conversation (Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013; Keitel et al., 2013; Keitel and Daum, 2015). Prior work has shown
that, compared to explicit measures of turn-end prediction (e.g.,
button-press; de Ruiter et al., 2006), anticipatory eye movements
from the prior to the next speaker tend to occur quite late at
points of speaker transition (children: Casillas and Frank, 2012,
2013; Keitel et al., 2013; Keitel and Daum, 2015; and adults: Tice
and Henetz, 2011; Hirvenkari et al., 2013; but also see Holler
and Kendrick, 2015 for earlier switching in adults). Eye-tracking
measures therefore do not target turn-end prediction the same
way that button press measures do. Instead, they appear to index
the prediction of upcoming turn transitions and the onset of
an upcoming response, both of which are affected by linguistic
material present in the pre-transition turn (e.g., question vs. nonquestion, prosodic information, etc. . . ). We track participants’
anticipatory eye movements to upcoming speakers as a natural
measure of their predictions about upcoming turn structure.
We sampled from two linguistic populations to test the
robustness of our findings: Dutch (Experiment 1) and British
English (Experiment 2). Dutch and English use similar linguistic
structures to form simple declaratives and polar interrogatives; in
both languages the subject precedes the verb in declarative utterances, whereas interrogative utterances are created by subjectverb inversion (Dryer, 2013). The prototypical intonation pattern
for polar questions in both languages also features a final rise2
(e.g., Dutch: Haan, 2002; English: Grabe and Post, 2004).

Experiment 1
Materials and Methods
Participants
Thirty-three native Dutch-speaking 2.5-year-olds participated
in the experiment. Of these, twelve were excluded because of
2 Final-rising

contours are considered prototypical for polar questions, but there
are also many other intonation contours used with polar questions in spontaneous
speech (see, e.g., Couper-Kuhlen, 2012).

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 276

Lammertink et al.

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

equipment error (1) or inattention to the screen during the experiment (11; see Section Data Pre-Processing). As a result, 21 toddlers were included in the final analysis (Female = 13, mean
age = 29 months, range = 24–33 months). Sixteen adult participants (native Dutch speakers, Female = 15, mean age = 23 years)
participated as a control group. No hearing or vision problems
were reported. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from
the Ethiek commissie faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen (ECSW)
at Radboud University in Nijmegen.

Apparatus
We recruited and tested toddlers through the Baby Research Center (BRC) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The data were obtained
with a 17-inch Tobii 1750 eye-tracker (Tobii Technology AB;
binocular infrared light reflection, 50 Hz sampling frequency,
accuracy range: 0.5◦ to 1◦ , recovery <100 ms). Eye-tracker calibration and stimulus presentation were controlled by ClearView
2.7.1 software. Audio speakers were placed at either side of the
screen, hidden from participant view. Participants sat approximately 60 cm from the monitor, with toddlers sitting on their
parent’s lap.

Procedure
Each session began with a 9-point infant-friendly calibration procedure. Data collection started when good calibration for both
eyes was obtained for at least five locations on the screen (every
corner and the center). Children then watched eight 30-s videos
of conversation between two puppets. Before each conversation, the experimenter displayed an animated smiley face on the
screen until children’s gaze returned to the center. After every two
conversations, participants saw a 4–9-s animated filler video (a
train, a skating dog, and a running chick). The experiment took
5 min in total. Two versions of the experiment were created, with

conversation videos ordered differently in each. In both versions,
the same pair of puppets was shown, at most, twice in a row.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two versions.

Audio Stimuli
Target utterances
We created four types of target utterances by controlling for lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues to turn completion (Table 1). At
the point of syntactic completion (or incompletion) for each target utterance we inserted 500 ms of silence (“[. . . ]” in Table 1).
Participants could then make a prediction, depending on the linguistic information up to that point, about whether the same
speaker would continue or whether the addressee would respond.
We measured participants’ anticipatory gaze to the addressee
around these 500 ms silent windows.
The utterances with cues to turn completeness featured polar
interrogative syntax (+SYN), a polar interrogative pitch contour (+PROS; a high, final rise in Standard Dutch; Haan, 2002),
or both. The utterances with cues to turn incompleteness featured incomplete declarative syntax (−SYN), incomplete noninterrogative pitch contours (−PROS), or both. The incomplete
non-interrogative pitch contours were deemed “incomplete”
because they lacked boundary tones at the onset of the inserted
500 ms silence.
By this design, fully complete utterances were both lexicosyntactically and prosodically complete, and took the form of polar
interrogatives with a final rise pitch contour, followed by 500 ms
of silence (e.g., Shall we swim together? [. . . ]). Meanwhile, fully
incomplete utterances were both lexicosyntactically and prosodically incomplete at the onset of the 500 ms silence. These fully
incomplete utterances took the form of declarative sentences that
had been split into two parts by 500 ms of silence; at the onset of
the silence (where we measured participants’ anticipatory gaze),

TABLE 1 | (A) Examples of target utterances in the four conditions. (B) Example of a conversation with the four target utterances embedded in six filler
utterances.
(A) Target utterances
Condition

Cues

Example

(1) Fully incomplete

−SYN

Today is a beautiful+ […] +day for a swim

(B) Conversation
Speaker

Example

A

I think I’ll go swimming today

B (1)

Today is a beautiful+ […] +day for a swim

B

And I have a new swimsuit

B (2)

It’s made especially for? […] Swimming in the ocean

A

Wow, you should try it out then

−PROS

(2) Incomplete syntax

−SYN

It’s made especially for? […] Swimming in the ocean

+PROS

(3) Incomplete prosody

+SYN

Do you enjoy swimming+ […]

A

I bet you bought a really nice one

B (3)

Do you enjoy swimming+ […]

A

Yes, I like to swim a lot

B (4)

Shall we swim together? […]

B

That would be really fun

−PROS

(4) Fully complete

+SYN

Shall we swim together? […]

+PROS

Each utterance is marked as syntactically complete (+SYN) or incomplete (−SYN), and prosodically complete (+PROS) or incomplete (−PROS). The symbol “?” indicates a complete,
polar interrogative pitch contour, “+” indicates the lack of a boundary tone, and “[…]” indicates a 500 ms silence. Examples are taken from the British English stimuli used in Experiment 2.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 277

Lammertink et al.

the in-progress utterance was lexicosyntactically incomplete and
had no final boundary tone (e.g., Today is a beautiful+ [. . . ] +day
for a swim).
The two other target utterance types were only partially complete. For example, utterances that were prosodically complete
but lexicosyntactically incomplete took the form of declarative sentences that had been split into two parts by 500 ms of
silence; at the onset of the silence, the in-progress utterance was
lexicosyntactically incomplete but prosodically complete, with a
final rise pitch contour (e.g., It’s made especially for? [. . . ] swimming in the ocean). Meanwhile, utterances that were lexicosyntactically complete but prosodically incomplete, took the form of
complete polar interrogatives that lacked a final boundary tone
at the onset of the 500 ms of silence (e.g., Do you enjoy swimming+ [. . . ]). Table 1 gives an example conversation that demonstrates the placement of the 500 ms silences for each utterance
type.
With this design, all lexicosyntactically complete utterances
were interrogative and all lexicosyntactically incomplete utterances were declarative. In designing the utterance types this way,
we created a maximal contrast in participants’ expectations about
an upcoming turn switch between the fully complete and fully
incomplete utterances. Questions naturally project an answer in
the next turn, and so observers could reliably expect a turn transition after hearing a question (Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013).
Declaratives do not necessarily project a turn transition, and
so observers’ expectations after declaratives are much weaker.
We sought to create a maximal difference in the fully complete
and incomplete conditions because they served as the baselines
for our primary conditions of interest: the partially complete
conditions (incomplete syntax and incomplete prosody).
We could have instead tried to keep word order the same
across the complete and incomplete lexicosyntactic conditions,
but this would have created other problems. For example, using
interrogative word order for all utterance types would have signaled turn transition early on in the utterance for all sentences,
yielding ambiguous and unnatural sentences in the lexicosyntactically incomplete condition (“Would you like a+”). Using
declarative word order in both conditions could have possibly
worked; declarative polar questions do occur in spontaneous
Dutch and English (Gunlogson, 2001; Englert, 2010). But declarative polar questions are primarily used for the initiation of repair
or for confirmation requests, whereas interrogative polar questions are primarily used for requesting information (Englert,
2010). Thus, even if we used declarative word order for all
utterance types, the speech acts would still differ across types.
Additionally, to use declarative polar questions, we would need
to generate the required contexts for declarative questioning
into the scripts (e.g., potential mishearing/misunderstanding),
thereby introducing further variation across conversations. Considering these issues together, we decided to use interrogative
polar questions for lexicosyntactically complete conditions and
unfinished declaratives (at the onset of the 500 ms silence) for
lexicosyntactically incomplete conditions. There were eight target sentences in each conversation, resulting in 32 total target
sentences. Each of the four conditions for target sentences is
described below.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

Conversation design
The targets were embedded in eight 30-s scripted conversations about topics familiar to 2.5-year-olds (rabbits, snowmen,
swimming, birthday parties, and bicycles; Zink and Lejaegere,
2003). Every conversation had six filler and four target utterances,
including one target utterance from each type (Table 1B). Targets
and filler utterances were separated by 500 ms of silence.
The order of the target utterances within the eight
conversations was counterbalanced. Target utterances were
equally divided between the two speakers across the eight conversations of the experiment. After fully incomplete and incomplete
syntax target utterances, no turn transition occurred following
the 500 ms of silence; the current speaker always completed her
turn. After incomplete prosody and fully complete target utterances, target turns were followed by 500 ms and then a change in
speakership 50% of the time. Each conversation contained from
five to seven turn transitions.

Stimulus preparation
The audio stimuli were recorded in a sound-attenuated booth
by two female native speakers of Standard Dutch. The audio for
each experiment was collected over two recording sessions. In the
first session, both speakers were recorded simultaneously while
they acted out the eight dialogs together, three times each. Speakers were asked to read each conversation in an infant-directed
register. The filler utterances were then extracted from the best
recording of each conversation and then set aside for use in
the final stimuli. In the second recording session, speakers were
recorded individually as they read an additional set of recording utterances aloud. The additional recording sentences were
designed to elicit sub-parts of the target sentences—subparts that
could then be spliced together to create the final target utterances (see below). In the second recording, speakers matched
their pitch, speaking rate, and affect to the first recording by
listening to the first-session conversations over a pair of headphones. The final target utterances were then spliced together
from these second-session utterances, and then the conversations
were spliced together from a combination of the filler and target
utterances.
We composed each target utterance from three or four parts:
an initial part, a prosody part, a silence, and (for lexicosyntactically incomplete utterances) a completion part (Figure 1). Each
part derived from a separate recording utterance (from the second recording session). The parts were then spliced together
to obtain the final set of target utterances (Praat; Boersma and
Weenink, 2012).
The “initial part” of the target utterance was two words long,
with an utterance-initial non-interrogative prosodic contour. For
example, the “I’ve seen” in “I’ve see carrots behind the swings”
was extracted from the recording sentence “I’ve seen caramel”
(Figure 1).
The “prosody part” was also two words long. For prosodically
incomplete target utterances, there was no prosodic boundary at
the end of the second word. For example, “carrots behind” was
extracted from the recording sentence “I’ve seen carrots behind
the broccoli for weeks”. In these recording sentences, the utterance always continued beyond the splicing point to ensure that

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 278

Lammertink et al.

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

FIGURE 1 | Division of two target utterances into their subparts. The initial part (green), the prosody part (red), and the silence (green) were present in all target
utterances. The completion part (gray) was only present in lexicosyntactically incomplete target utterances.

there was no intonational phrase boundary at the end of the twoword prosodic part. On the other hand, for prosodically complete
utterances, the two-word prosody part had a complete, interrogative prosodic contour. For example, “like bananas” was extracted
from the recording sentence “Said he: ‘like bananas?’” (Figure 1).
The prosody part was followed by 500 ms of silence. Although
500 ms is somewhat long for an inter-turn gap in adult
conversation (Stivers et al., 2009), it closely resembles the median
response latency for children in interaction with their parents
(549 ms for children’s responses at 2;4–2;5; Casillas et al., in press)
and it is much shorter than their median response latency with
their peers (900 ms for children’s responses at 2;10–3;3; Garvey
and Berninger, 1981). A pause of 500 ms also gives participants
(especially the children) substantial time to process the lexicosyntactic and prosodic information in the utterance preceding a
turn transition. The 500 ms window also allowed reliable measurement of children’s anticipatory eye movements because toddlers need at least 300 ms to plan a shift in gaze (Fernald et al.,
2001).
Finally, the completion part (only present in the lexicosyntactically incomplete utterances) contained between one and five
words that syntactically completed the pre-silence portion. For
example, “the swings” was extracted from “I’ve seen carrots behind
the swings” (Figure 1).
To avoid audibly mismatched co-articulation, we matched
the place of articulation for phonemes at splicing boundaries.
For example, the initial part “I’ve seen” was followed by a/k/in
the recording sentence to match the initial/k/of the prosody
part “carrots behind.” That way, when spliced together, “I’ve
seen” + “carrots behind” had no conflicting co-articulatory cues.
Similarly, we avoided co-articulatory cues to upcoming speech
by controlling the phonemes immediately following incomplete
prosody parts. For example, “carrots behind” was followed by
an/ /(“the”) in the recording sentence. Because the/d/in “behind”
and the/ /in “the” approximately match in place of articulation,
there is no co-articulation to cue further upcoming speech. Alternately, the prosody part was followed by a phoneme with a
neutral place of articulation (/ /or/h/), matched for the 500 ms
silence.
We also controlled for primary stress in the two-word initial parts that had interrogative word order (fully complete and

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

incomplete prosody). Though the primary prosodic cue for polar
interrogatives is a final high rise, they also often have high fundamental frequency at the start of the utterance (Haan, 2002).
To counteract this and to also prevent the presence of prosodic
boundary tones at points of intended prosodic incompleteness,
we asked speakers to put emphasis on words that came late in the
utterance, thereby avoiding stress placement at the start of the
utterance or at the intended splicing points.

Stimulus pre-testing
We verified the status of our utterances as lexicosyntactically
complete/incomplete with a web-based experiment using a written version of the utterances. Fourteen participants (Female =
7, mean age = 23.8 years old, native Dutch speakers) read and
judged the completeness of the thirty-two (16 −SYN and 16
+SYN) target sentences up to the point of the inserted 500 ms
silence (Qualtrics Software Version 55939, 20143 ). All target sentences were found to be complete or incomplete, as intended, by
more than 75% of the participants.
We verified our manipulation of prosodic completeness with a
listening experiment conducted in Praat (Boersma and Weenink,
2012). Twelve participants (Female = 10, mean age = 24 years,
native Dutch speakers) heard low-pass filtered versions of the target utterances (300 Hz and 50 Hz Hanning window), and were
asked to judge whether each one was a question or not. Low-pass
filtering removes segmental information so that only prosodic
information remains. Each target utterance was presented twice,
with the order of utterances fully randomized. Eleven (34%;
five complete and six incomplete) targets were judged differently than intended (e.g., judged as an interrogative contour
when it should have been non-interrogative, or vice versa) in
more that 25% of the judgments. These ambiguous prosodic contours were therefore taken into account during data analysis and
interpretation.

Video Stimuli
Two pairs of puppets were used to create the stimulus videos.
To match the puppet videos to the audio stimuli as closely as
3 Qualtrics (2014), Provo, Utah, USA. Available from: http://www.qualtrics.com
(Version 55939).

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 279

Lammertink et al.

possible, two puppeteers listened to the dialogs and simultaneously moved the puppet mouths during video recording. The
puppeteers aimed to complete an open-close mouth movement
for each syllable in the recording. With the exception of mouth
movements, the puppets were immobile. We then combined the
puppet video recordings with the audio stimuli, maximizing the
quality of sound and speech alignment in Adobe Premiere Pro
video editing software.

Data Pre-Processing
Before analyzing children’s anticipatory gaze switches, the raw
data set was pre-processed to remove unreliable tracker output
and to prepare gaze measurements for the main gaze-switch analysis. We only counted participants’ gaze measurements when
the Tobii output marked the look as valid in at least one eye.
Trials were excluded when a participant attended to the screen
for less than 75% of the total trial duration. If this happened
for more than four trials, the participant’s data was completely
excluded from further analysis because of a general inattention
to the stimuli. In total, eleven toddlers (33%) were completely
excluded by this criterion. No adults were completely excluded.
From the remaining participants (21 toddlers and 16 adults), 27
trials (2.5%) were excluded in total (toddlers: 21, adults: 6). The
final dataset contained gaze data for 1056 trials.
Our main question was how toddlers use linguistic cues in
their prediction of upcoming speaker changes, so we only analyzed gaze switches that were initiated before children could have
reacted to speaker continuation/speaker switch. We used an algorithm for switch identification developed by Casillas and Frank
(under review). According to this three-step checklist, switches
are anticipatory if they fulfill the following criteria: (1) a participant fixates on the prior speaker for at least 100 ms at the end of
the prior turn, (2) sometime thereafter the participant switches to
fixate on the upcoming speaker for at least 100 ms and, (3) a gaze

FIGURE 2 | Shuffling procedure for estimating random baseline
anticipatory switches. We created 100 randomly shuffled versions of
the original analysis window placement. The horizontal line represents
the duration of one example dialog. The white boxes on the line
represent the four 500 ms silences after potential target turn transitions
(32 in total across the 8 dialogs; See Table 1). The black boxes
beneath the line represent the four analysis windows for each target

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

shift is initiated within the first 300 ms of the response turn for
toddlers (Fernald et al., 2001), or 200 ms for adults4 .
Random gaze switches between speakers can sometimes, by
chance, conform to these three criteria, and could therefore be
mistakenly categorized as “true” gaze switches. Therefore, we estimated and corrected for participants’ baseline random anticipatory looking behavior. Again, algorithmic details were borrowed
from Casillas and Frank (under review). We ran each participant’s actual eye-tracking data through the exact same switch
identification algorithm (described above), but this time with 100
randomly-shuffled versions of the original turn-transitions in the
videos (Figure 2). The idea was that, if we assume as our null
hypothesis that children’s switching behavior is random, their
rates of anticipatory switching should be the same no matter
where we place our analysis windows (at real turn transitions vs.
anywhere else in the stimulus). We therefore made 100 versions
of the original analysis windows in which the original analysis
windows for each stimulus were distributed randomly between
its start and end time (Figure 2). Then, using the three-step
algorithm described above, we determined whether the participant made an anticipatory switch or not for each turn transition in each randomly-shuffled version. This procedure was
repeated 100 times. Then we averaged the results to get a single baseline estimate of random switching for each target turn
transition for each participant. We then obtained corrected anticipatory gaze switch values by subtracting the random anticipatory gaze switch value from the original gaze switch value for
each turn transition for each participant. These corrected anticipatory switch values were then used in all statistical analyses
(see also Figures 3, 5).

4 The children in the current experiment are older than those in Casillas and Frank

(under review; ages 1–6), so we adopted a shorter window (300ms, not 333ms) for
the assumed time needed for children to plan a gaze shift (Fernald et al., 2001).

500 ms silence. In the original version, the analysis windows are
centered on the target 500 ms silences. In the shuffled versions, the
analysis windows are randomly redistributed over the duration of the
turn. We then re-ran the gaze identification algorithm, pairing the eye
tracker data with each randomly shuffled version to estimate the
baseline probability of making an anticipatory shift when the analysis
windows are uncoupled from the actual target 500 ms silences.

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 280

Lammertink et al.

FIGURE 3 | Proportion of baseline (dashed) and actual anticipatory
(solid) gaze switches to the answerer, by condition and age. The
conditions were: Fully incomplete (−SYN −PROS); Incomplete syntax

Results
The complete pre-processed dataset (toddlers and adults
together) was analyzed using linear mixed effect models (lme4;
Bates et al., 2012) in the statistical programming language R (R
Development Core Team, 2013). Significance of the predictors
was evaluated by using the obtained z-score as a t-statistic (|t|>
1.96 is significant at α = 0.05).

Pre-Analysis: Random Anticipatory Looking
The original anticipatory gaze switches and the random baseline anticipatory gaze switches are visualized in Figure 3. Participants switch less than would be expected by chance in the fully
incomplete (−SYN, −PROS) condition, at chance level for the
incomplete syntax (−SYN, +PROS) condition, and above chance
for both the incomplete prosody (+SYN, −PROS) and fully complete (+SYN, +PROS) conditions. This pattern suggests that
participants use both lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues for turnprojection: When both cues are incomplete, participants do not
expect a speaker change, whereas when both cues are complete,
they do. When the cues are pitted against each other, listeners
weigh lexicosyntactic over prosodic cues.

Lexicosyntactic and Prosodic cues
In order to assess the effects of linguistic cue and participant age,
we first fit a model to participants’ baseline-corrected anticipatory switches (1056 observations; N = 37; Table 2). All targets
(N = 32) were included in the model. Recall that the prosodic
pre-test (Section Conversation Design) showed that eleven targets had ambiguous prosodic contours. A model including these
ambiguous targets did not reveal qualitatively different results
compared to a model excluding these targets. Therefore, the final
model included all targets. The dependent variable was participants’ baseline-corrected anticipatory gaze switches. Predictor

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

(−SYN +PROS); Incomplete prosody (+SYN −PROS); Fully complete
(+SYN +PROS). The vertical bars indicate the standard error of the
mean.

TABLE 2 | Outcomes from the linear mixed effects model including both
subject groups (Dutch toddlers and adults; Number of observations: 1056;
N = 37).
Predictor

Contrast coding

Intercept

β

t (z)

p

0.15

4.77

Syntactic completeness

Incomplete (−1)
Complete (1)

0.20

6.67

<0.001

Prosodic completeness

Incomplete (−1)
Complete (1)

0.075

2.56

<0.05

Age

Toddler (−1) Adult (1)

0.019

1.28

−0.0015

−0.051

Syntactic completeness × Age

0.024

2.03

Prosodic completeness × Age

0.022

1.82

Syntactic completeness × Prosodic

0.0065

0.54

Syntactic completeness × Prosodic
completeness

0.05

completeness × Age

variables included syntactic completeness (incomplete vs. complete), prosodic completeness (incomplete vs. complete) and age
(toddler vs. adult). The predictor variables were contrast-coded
(Table 2) and the intercept was allowed to vary by subject and
item.
The amount of linguistic information consistent with turn
completion affected participants’ anticipatory switching. Model
coefficients show three significant effects in the anticipatory gaze
data. First, the proportion of anticipatory gaze switches was larger
for the lexicosyntactically complete vs. incomplete targets (β =
0.20, z = 6.67, p < 0.001). Second, more anticipatory gaze
switches were made for complete prosodic contours than for
incomplete prosodic contours (β = 0.075, z = 2.56, p < 0.05).
Third, there was an interaction between syntactic completeness

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 281

Lammertink et al.

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

and age (β = 0.024, z = 2.03, p = 0.05). No other coefficients
reached significance.
Visual inspection of the data (Figure 4) suggests that interaction between syntactic completeness and age comes from the
fully complete condition, in which toddlers and adults differed in
their overall number of anticipatory switches (adults switch more
than toddlers do). We fitted a model restricted to the syntactically
complete conditions (fully complete and incomplete prosody, 528
observations, N = 37, Table 3) to test this hypothesis. No significant effect of age was found. Therefore, this explanation for the
interaction was not verified in the statistical model.

Relative Weight of Lexicosyntactic and Prosodic
Cues
A second model was fit to test the relative weight of lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues. We restricted the data to the two
partially complete conditions (incomplete syntax and incomplete
prosody). The predictor variables were condition (incomplete syntax vs. incomplete prosody) and age (toddler vs. adult). Again, the
intercept was allowed to vary by subject and item.
The model showed that participants weighed lexicosyntactic
cues over prosodic cues. Participants made more anticipatory gaze switches after utterances with complete syntax
(incomplete prosody) compared to utterances with complete

prosody (incomplete syntax; β = 0.12, z = 2.62, p < 0.05;
Table 4). No other predictors reached significance.

Speaker Change or Speaker Continuation
Recall that lexicosyntactically complete targets were followed by
a change in speakership 50% of the time. Ideally there should
be no difference between cases of speaker change and speaker
continuation. If there were a difference, it could indicate that
participants’ gaze switches were triggered by the mouth movement of the responding or continuing puppet rather than by the
participants’ predictions alone.
We ran an additional analysis to test whether anticipatory gaze
switches were influenced by speaker change in the lexicosyntactically complete conditions (fully complete and incomplete
prosody), with speaker continuation (-1) and speaker change (1)
contrast-coded. The analysis was restricted to the lexicosyntactically complete conditions since syntactically incomplete targets
were always followed by continuation of the same speaker.
The model (528 observations, N = 37) revealed a significant effect of speaker change. Participants made more anticipatory gaze switches when the target was followed by a speaker
change compared to a speaker continuation (β = 0.18, z = 5.26,
p < 0.001; Table 5). No other coefficients reached significance.
A closer look at the video stimuli indeed showed that sound
and mouth movement were not adequately aligned in almost
half of the syntactically complete target utterances: In nine of

TABLE 4 | Outcomes from the linear mixed effects model of the two
partially complete conditions for both subject groups (incomplete syntax,
incomplete prosody, Number of observations: 528; N = 37).
Predictor

Contrast coding

β

Intercept

0.15

3.14

Condition

Incomplete syntax (−1)
Incomplete prosody (1)

0.12

2.62

Age

Toddler (−1) Adult (1)

0.012

0.57

0.0026

0.15

Condition × Age

Predictor

β

t(z)

0.34

p

p

8.88

0.074

2.16

Age

Toddler (−1)
Adult (1)

0.044

1.69

Speaker change

No (−1) Yes (1)

0.18

5.26 <0.001

5.71

Prosodic completeness ×

Incomplete (−1) Complete (1)

0.074

1.29

Speaker change

Toddler (−1) Adult (1)

0.044

1.70

Age × Speaker changes

0.028

1.52

Prosodic completeness × Age ×

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

t (z)

0.34

Prosodic completeness

completeness

β

Incomplete (−1)
Complete (1)

Age
Age × Prosodic

<0.05

Prosodic completeness

Prosodic completeness × Age
Intercept

Contrast coding

Intercept

TABLE 3 | Result from the linear mixed effects models for Dutch toddlers
and adults by lexicosyntactic complete targets (528 observations, N = 37).
Contrast coding

p

TABLE 5 | Results from the linear mixed effect models for Dutch toddlers
and adults in the lexicosyntactically complete conditions, including the
predictor variable speaker change (528 observations, N = 37).

FIGURE 4 | Proportion baseline-corrected anticipatory switches to the
answerer by condition and age (Adults: dashed; Toddlers: solid). The
conditions were: Fully incomplete (−SYN −PROS); Incomplete syntax (−SYN
+PROS); Incomplete prosody (+SYN −PROS); Fully complete (+SYN
+PROS). The vertical bars indicate the standard error of the mean.

Predictor

t (z)

0.029

1.54

−0.010

−0.31

0.022

1.17

<0.05

−0.0078 −0.42

Speaker change

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 282

Lammertink et al.

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

the sixteen lexicosyntactically complete target utterances, mouth
movement preceded the onset of the audio signal by more than
a few milliseconds. This early mouth movement could have
triggered participants’ gaze shifts toward the moving puppet,
regardless of the linguistic content available.
Additionally, because the prior speaker always continued after
the silence for lexicosyntactically incomplete targets, but only
continued 50% of the time after lexicosyntactically complete targets, there was a statistical bias in the stimuli that could have
caused participants to make fewer anticipatory gaze switches for
lexicosyntactically incomplete targets. If so, participants would
have to learn this statistical bias during the course of the experiment; it should only be present at the end of the experiment.
We fit two linear mixed effect models to (a) data from the first
two trials (268 observations, N = 36) and (b) data from the last
two trials (248 observations, N = 34). In both models, the main
effect of lexicosyntactic completeness was present (First two trials: β = 0.146; z = 3.052, p < 0.01; Last two trials: β = 0.199,
z = 4.885, p < 0.0001, Table 6). The results therefore do not support statistical learning as a basis for the effects of lexicosyntactic
completeness.

Discussion
Both Dutch toddlers and adults used lexicosyntactic and prosodic
cues in their anticipation of upcoming speaker changes. Participants made the least anticipatory gaze switches when both cues
signaled an incomplete turn. The most anticipatory gaze switches
were made when both cues signaled a complete turn. When the
lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues were pitted against each other
(incomplete syntax and incomplete prosody), listeners weighed
lexicosyntactic over prosodic cues.
The advantage for lexicosyntactic over prosodic cues in turnprojection is consistent with prior work on adult turn-taking
(Caspers, 2001; de Ruiter et al., 2006), but was unexpected for
toddlers. Recent work on children’s use of prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues in predicting upcoming turn structure found an
early global advantage for prosodic over lexicosyntactic cues in
1- and 2-year-olds (Casillas and Frank, 2013). An early advantage

for prosodic cues would have also been consistent with the general pattern in language acquisition that sensitivity to prosodic
cues precedes sensitivity to lexicosyntactic cues (Nazzi et al., 1998;
Christophe et al., 2008).
Before accepting the hypothesis that 2.5-year-old toddlers
weigh lexicosyntactic over prosodic cues in their turn-projection,
alternative explanations need to be explored. A first explanation
relates to the reliability of the prosodic contours in the stimuli. Recall that 11 of the 32 prosodic contours were ambiguous in whether they signaled interrogativity (completeness) or
not; pre-test participants classified these 11 contours incorrectly
at least 25% of the time. The results of the main experiment
did not qualitatively shift when these ambiguous prosodic contours were included (Section Lexicosyntactic and Prosodic Cues),
but their presence could have affected overall task performance.
For example, toddlers may have noticed that the prosodic contours were strange or unclear and therefore unconsciously shifted
their attention away from the prosodic cues in favor of the (less
ambiguous) lexicosyntactic cues.
Another alternative explanation for toddlers’ reliance on lexicosyntactic cues is that the puppet movements gave unintentional
cues to turn hold or turn transition. Post-hoc analyses revealed
that participants made more anticipatory gaze switches when
lexicosyntactically complete turns were followed by a change in
speakership compared to when they were followed by a continuation of the same speaker. We found that non-verbal cues
(e.g., opening mouth, movements) preceded the onset of the
acoustic signal in 9 of the 16 syntactically complete target utterances. These early non-verbal cues could have enhanced the
effect of lexicosyntactic completeness, because early visual cues
to speaker change were available in some of the lexicosyntactically complete target utterances, while lexicosyntactically
incomplete target utterances were never followed with visual
cues to speaker change (the same speaker always continued;
Table 1).
Despite these methodological issues, the results from Experiment 1 still suggest that lexicosyntactic cues are weighed
over prosodic ones in children’s prediction of upcoming turn
structure. To test the robustness (non-language specificity) of

TABLE 6 | Outcomes from the main linear mixed effects model for (A): first two trials of the experiment and (B): last two trials of the experiment (Dutch
toddlers and adults).
Dutch
(A). First two trials

(B). Last two trials

268 observations, N = 36

248 observations, N = 33

β

t (z)

Intercept

0.114

2.364

Syntactic completeness

0.146

3.052

Prosodic completeness

0.0382

Age

0.0301

Syntactic completeness × Prosodic completeness
Syntactic completeness × Age
Prosodic completeness × Age
Syntactic completeness × Prosodic completeness × Age

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

p

t (z)

β
0.0984

2.225

0.199

4.885

<0.0001

0.798

0.0847

2.080

<0.05

1.130

0.000563

0.020

<0.01

−1.465

0.0242

0.595

0.0224

0.866

−0.0131

−0.575

0.0192

0.744

0.0115

0.503

0.0335

1.470

−0.701

−0.679

p

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 283

Lammertink et al.

these findings, we conducted a second experiment with British
English toddlers and adults.

Experiment 2
Experiment 2 tested how English-speaking toddlers weigh
prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues for upcoming turn structure
prediction. Diverging slightly from Experiment 1, the recording
and splicing for the target utterances in Experiment 2 used an
extra criterion: the “prosody part” of the target utterances contained at least four syllables (only two were used in Experiment
1; see Section Stimulus Preparation). By extending the prosodic
contour over more syllables, we gave the listener more time to
perceive the contour being used. We derived the criterion of “four
syllables” from the Dutch pre-test for prosodic completeness;
most of the errors were made on prosody parts with fewer than
four syllables. As in Experiment 1, participants’ eye movements
were recorded as they watched eight videos of dyadic puppet
conversation.

Materials and Methods
Participants
Twenty-five native British English-speaking 2.5-year-olds participated in the experiment. Of these, five were excluded because
of equipment error (1) and inattention to the screen during the
experiment (4; see Section Data Pre-Processing). As a result, 20
toddlers were included in the final set for analysis (Female =
10, mean age = 29 months, range = 25–33 months). Twenty
adult participants (native British English-speakers, Female = 13,
mean age = 21 years) participated as a control group. No participants reported hearing or vision problems. Ethical approval was
obtained via the Ethics Committee for the School of Humanities
and Social Sciences of the University of Cambridge.

Apparatus and Procedure
All participants were tested in the Psycholinguistics Lab of the
Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in Cambridge, UK. Eye-tracker calibration and stimulus presentation
were controlled by Tobii Studio 3.2.1.190 software. The data were
obtained with a Tobii X120 infrared eye-tracking camera (Tobii
Technology AB; binocular infrared light reflection, 120 Hz sampling frequency, accuracy range: 0.5◦ to 1◦ , recovery <300 ms).
The camera was placed below a 17-inch monitor and calibrated
for distance and angle relative to the monitor. The experimental
procedure was the same as for Experiment 1.

Materials
Target sentences
Target sentences were created and spliced using the same procedure as in Experiment 1 (Section Audio Stimuli; Table 1).
Again, we verified the lexicosyntactic completeness of the targets with a web-based experiment of the sentences in written
form (N = 14, female = 8, mean age = 29 years old, native
British English speakers). All targets were found to be complete
or incomplete, as intended, by more than 75% of the participants.
Also as before, we conducted a prosodic completeness listening
pre-test (Praat; Boersma and Weenink, 2012; N = 12, female =

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

10, mean age = 24 years, native British English speakers), which
showed that only two (both prosodically complete) target sentences had ambiguous prosody. Their contours were judged as
non-interrogative instead of interrogative in more that 25% of
the judgments.

Conversation and video construction
Conversations in Experiment 2 (English) were not restricted to
word-for-word translations of the conversations in Experiment
1 (Dutch) to allow for more freedom in using child-friendly and
culturally appropriate topics (Fenson et al., 1993). However, the
structure (turns and placement of conditions) and length (30s) of
the conversations were identical between the two experiments.
Audio recordings were obtained using the same procedure
from Experiment 1, but with two female native Southern British
English speakers (the local dialect in the testing region).
The same pairs of puppets were used from Experiment 1.
As before, we created puppet video recordings to match the
final audio stimuli. All video recordings were edited for speech
alignment and sound quality in Adobe Premiere Elements video
editing software. If perfect alignment of sound and movement
could not be achieved, the audio signal always preceded the video
movement, so that movement of the mouths could not be used as
an anticipatory cue for turn transition. This criterion was added
to avoid an effect of visual cues to turn transition on participants’
looking behavior.

Data Pre-Processing and Analysis
The same criteria and algorithms were used as in Experiment
1 for participant exclusion, anticipatory gaze switche identification, and random-baseline correction of switching values (Section Data Pre-Processing; Figure 2). In total, four toddlers (16%)
were completely excluded from the analyses for inattention to
the screen. No adults were completely excluded. Of the remaining participants (20 toddlers, 20 adults), 27 trials (2.3%) were
excluded (25 for the toddlers and two for the adults). The final
data set contained gaze data for 1144 trials.

Results
Pre-Analysis: Random Anticipatory Looking
Participants switched less than would be expected by chance in
the fully incomplete (-SYN -PROS) condition, at chance level
for the incomplete syntax (−SYN +PROS) condition, and above
chance for both the incomplete prosody (−SYN +PROS) and
fully complete (+SYN +PROS) conditions (Figure 5). This pattern again suggests that participants use both lexicosyntactic and
prosodic cues for turn-projection. As in Experiment 1, when both
cues were incomplete, participants were least likely to expect a
speaker change, whereas when both cues were complete, they
were the most likely to expect one. When the cues were pitted against each other, listeners weighed lexicosyntactic over
prosodic cues.

Lexicosyntactic and Prosodic Cues
A model similar to that fitted in Experiment 1 assessed the effects
of linguistic cues and age on participants’ baseline-corrected
anticipatory gaze switches (1144 observations, N = 40;

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 284

Lammertink et al.

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

FIGURE 5 | Proportion of baseline (dashed) and actual anticipatory
(solid) gaze switches to the answerer, by condition and age. The
conditions were: Fully incomplete (−SYN −PROS); Incomplete syntax

(−SYN +PROS); Incomplete prosody (+SYN −PROS); Fully complete
(+SYN +PROS). The vertical bars indicate the standard error of the
mean.

TABLE 7 | Outcomes from main linear mixed effects model for both
subject groups (English toddlers and adults; Number of observations:
1144, N = 40).
Predictor

Contrast
coding

Intercept

β

t (z)

p

0.15

7.88

Syntactic completeness

Incomplete (−1)
Complete (1)

0.17

10.55

<0.001

Prosodic completeness

Incomplete (−1)
Complete (1)

0.084

5.12

<0.001

Age

Toddler (-1)
Adult (1)

−0.062

−4.37

<0.001

0.044

2.71

<0.05

Syntactic completeness × Prosodic
completeness
Syntactic completeness × Age

−0.0084 −0.74

Prosodic completeness × Age

−0.013

−1.34

Table 7). The dependent variable was participants’ baselinecorrected anticipatory switches. Predictor variables included
syntactic completeness (incomplete vs. complete), prosodic completeness (incomplete vs. complete) and age (toddler vs. adult).
The intercept was allowed to vary by subject and item, and the
predictor variables were contrast-coded (−1, 1).
Again we found that the amount of linguistic information consistent with turn completion affected participants’ anticipatory
switching (Figure 6). Model coefficients show four significant
effects (Figure 6; Table 7). First, the proportion of anticipatory
gaze switches was larger for the lexicosyntactically complete vs.
lexicosyntactically incomplete targets (β = 0.17, z = 10.55,
p < 0.001). Second, more anticipatory gaze switches were made
for complete prosodic contours vs. incomplete prosodic contours (β = 0.084, z = 5.12, p < 0.001). Third, toddlers made

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

FIGURE 6 | Proportion baseline-corrected anticipatory switches to the
answerer by condition and age (Adults: dashed; Toddlers: solid). The
conditions were: Fully incomplete (−SYN −PROS); Incomplete syntax
(−SYN +PROS); Incomplete prosody (+SYN −PROS); Fully complete
(+SYN +PROS). The vertical bars indicate the standard error of the mean.

more anticipatory gaze switches overall than adults (β = −0.062,
z = −4.37, p < 0.001). Fourth, there was an interaction between
syntactic completeness and prosodic completeness (β = 0.044,
z = 2.71, p < 0.05). No other coefficients reached significance.
We fit separate post-hoc models of the lexicosyntactically complete target sentences (fully complete and incomplete prosody) and
the lexicosyntactically incomplete target sentences (fully incomplete and incomplete syntax) to explain the interaction between
syntactic completeness and prosodic completeness. A model
restricted to syntactically complete target sentences (572 observations, N = 40; Table 8) showed a significant effect of prosodic

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 285

Lammertink et al.

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

TABLE 8 | Results from the linear mixed effect models for toddlers and adults together by lexicosyntactic condition (complete or incomplete, number of
observations for each condition: 572, N = 40).
Lexicosyntactic condition
Predictor

Complete

Incomplete

β

t(z)

Intercept

0.32

11.07

Prosodic completeness

0.13

4.92

<0.001

0.040

1.99

<0.01

−0.054

−3.61

0.018

−1.33

Age

−0.071

−3.22

Age × Prosodic completeness

−0.008

−0.44

completeness, with more anticipatory gaze switches for prosodically complete than prosodically incomplete contours (β = 0.13,
z = 4.92, p < 0.001). In comparison, a model restricted to
syntactically incomplete targets (572 observations, N = 40;
Table 8), only showed a marginal effect of prosodic completeness (β = 0.040, z = 1.99, p = 0.05). These post-hoc analyses
reveal that English listeners’ use of prosodic cues depends on
whether the utterances are syntactically complete; when utterances were lexicosyntactically incomplete, the effect of prosody
was only marginally significant.

Relative Weight of Lexicosyntactic and Prosodic
Cues
Similar to Experiment 1, we then fit a second model restricted
to the two partially complete conditions (incomplete syntax and
incomplete prosody) to test the relative weight of lexicosyntactic
and prosodic cues (484 observations, N = 40; Table 9). The predictor variables were condition (incomplete syntax vs. incomplete
prosody) and age (toddler vs. adult).
The model showed that participants weighed lexicosyntactic cues over prosodic cues; they made more anticipatory
gaze switches when they only had complete syntax (incomplete
prosody) compared to when they only had complete prosody
(incomplete syntax; β = 0.89; z = 3.29, p < 0.01).

Speaker Change or Speaker Continuation
We fit an additional model to the baseline-corrected switches
in lexicosyntactically complete target utterances (572 observations, N = 40; Table 10) in order to check whether
more anticipatory gaze switches were made when there was
a change in speakership compared to when there was no
change in speakership. The model suggested no effect of speaker
change/continuation (β = 0.039, z = 1.53, p = n.s) Therefore,
the effect of lexicosyntax in Experiment 2 cannot be attributed
to early visual cues of speaker change (as was possible in
Experiment 1).
Finally, we fit two models to data from (a) the first two trials (292 observations, N = 38) and (b) the last two trials (252
observations, N = 33) of the experiment to test whether children
learned to not switch after lexicosyntactically incomplete utterances during the course of the experiment. As in Experiment 1,
the post-hoc tests showed significant main effects of lexicosyntactic completeness in both the first two trials (β = 0.174, z = 4.574,
p < 0.0001) and the last two trials (β = 0.183, z = 7.252,

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

p

β

t(z)

−0.027

−1.30

p

0.05
<0.001

TABLE 9 | Outcomes from the linear mixed effects model for the two
partially complete conditions for both subject groups (incomplete
prosody, incomplete syntax, Number of observations: 572, N = 40).
Predictor

Contrast coding

Intercept
Condition

Incomplete syntax (−1)
Incomplete prosody (1)

Age

Toddler (−1) Adult (1)

Condition × Age

β

t (z)

0.10

3.63

0.089

3.29

−0.067

−3.67

0.0045

p

<0.01
<0.001

0.27

p < 0.0001, Table 11). It is therefore unlikely that our findings for lexicosyntactic completeness were driven by a learned
statistical bias.

Discussion
The second experiment showed a very similar pattern of findings
to Experiment 1: Toddlers and adults used both lexicosyntactic
and prosodic cues for turn projection. Also, both English toddlers
and adults weighed lexicosyntactic cues over prosodic cues when
the two were pitted against each other.
One difference in the results from Experiments 1 and 2 is that,
in Experiment 2 (English), toddlers made more anticipatory gaze
switches than adults. This effect of children switching more often
than adults has been previously observed in studies with a similar design (Casillas and Frank, 2012), having been explained as an
effect of the videos being easy to follow. The explanation is that
adults find the videos easy to comprehend and therefore track the
turn structure less closely with their eye movements. This explanation fits with our findings in that the presence of ambiguous
prosodic contours in Experiment 1 may have made the task more
difficult for Dutch adults, leading them to track the conversations
more closely than adults did in the clearer, easier contours in the
English stimuli.
A second difference between Experiments 1 and 2 is that
English listeners used prosodic cues when utterances were lexicosyntactically complete, but not when they were incomplete.
This effect was not observed for the Dutch listeners, but it is consistent with prior experimental work on English (Wichmann and
Caspers, 2001).

General Discussion
In two experiments, we investigated toddlers’ and adults’ use
of lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues in making predictions

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 286

Lammertink et al.

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

TABLE 10 | Results from the linear mixed effect models for English toddlers and adults together in the lexicosyntactically complete conditions, including
the predictor variable speaker change (Number of observations: 572, N = 40).
Predictor

Contrast coding

Intercept
Prosodic completeness

Incomplete (−1) Complete (1)

Age

Toddler (−1) Adult (1)

Speaker change

No (−1) Yes (1)

β

t (z)

0.32

11.23
4.99

<0.001

−0.071

−3.21

<0.01

0.039

1.53

0.13

Prosodic completeness × Age

p

−0.0076

−0.41

0.018

−0.70

Age × Speaker changes

−0.018

−1.01

Prosodic completeness × Age × Speaker change

−0.014

−0.74

Prosodic completeness × Speaker change

TABLE 11 | Outcomes from the main linear mixed effects model for (A): first two trials of the experiment and (B): last two trials of the experiment (English
toddlers and adults).
English
(A). First two trials

(B). Last two trials

292 observations, N = 38

252 observations, N = 38

β

t (z)

p

β

t (z)

p

Intercept

0.134

0.0381

0.106

3.973

Syntactic completeness

0.174

4.574

<0.0001

0.183

7.252

<0.0001

Prosodic completeness

0.0833

2.187

<0.05

0.068

3.827

<0.001

−0.0728

−3.233

<0.01

−0.0351

−1/394

Syntactic completeness × Prosodic completeness

0.0304

0.797

0.0486

1.920

Syntactic completeness × Age

0.00680

0.302

−0.0176

0.742

−0.0114

−0.505

−0.0146

−0.619

0.0167

0.755

−0.0146

−0.619

Age

Prosodic completeness × Age
Syntactic completeness × Prosodic completeness × Age

about upcoming turn structure. The experiments were conducted in two languages, Dutch and British English, to test
whether the findings were based on language-specific cues
for turn prediction. Adults and toddlers in both languages
used both lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues in their anticipation of upcoming speaker changes. Participants made the
most anticipatory gaze switches when both cues were complete and interrogative (fully complete). Participants also anticipated upcoming speaker changes when the lexicosyntactic cue
alone was complete and interrogative (incomplete prosody).
Importantly, complete lexicosyntax alone was not equivalent to the combined effect of complete lexicosyntax and
prosody; participants showed a benefit for prosody in that the
fully complete targets elicited more anticipatory gaze switches
than the targets with complete lexicosyntax alone (incomplete
prosody).
When only the prosodic cue was complete and interrogative
(incomplete syntax), participants’ anticipatory gaze switches did
not differ from chance. Participants made the fewest anticipatory
gaze switches when both cues were incomplete and declarative
(fully incomplete), making fewer gaze switches than would be
expected by chance. This last finding is the first to demonstrate
that toddlers know when not to switch; they keep their eyes on the
current speaker more often when lexicosyntactic and prosodic
cues both signal an incomplete turn.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Our general finding, that listeners use both lexicosyntactic
and prosodic cues for turn-projection (but weigh lexicosyntactic
information above prosody overall), is compatible with previous
findings showing an advantage for combined lexical and prosodic
cues over lexical cues alone (Duncan, 1972; Ford and Thompson,
1996; Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013).

Lexicosyntactic vs. Prosodic Cues
We tested the relative weight of lexicosyntactic and prosodic
cues by pitting them directly against each other in two conditions (incomplete syntax and incomplete prosody). Adults were
expected to privilege lexicosyntactic information above all (de
Ruiter et al., 2006; Magyari and de Ruiter, 2012), while toddlers were expected to privilege prosodic cues instead (Gleitman
and Wanner, 1982; Morgan and Demuth, 1996; Jusczyk, 1997;
Christophe et al., 2008; Casillas and Frank, 2013). Contrary to
our expectations, adults and toddlers did not differ in their relative cue weights; both showed a privilege for lexicosyntactic over
prosodic cues in their predictions. There are at least four reasons
why this finding could have arisen, three derive from the design
of our study and one from the use of prosody for other functions.
Participant’s expectations about upcoming turn structure were
maximally contrasted for our fully incomplete (no speaker switch
expected) and fully complete (speaker switch expected) conditions. Targets in the fully incomplete condition were always

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 287

Lammertink et al.

declaratives whereas targets in the fully complete condition were
interrogatives. Interrogatives automatically cue a speaker switch
whereas declaratives don’t. As a result, it is important to keep in
mind that (by design) the stimuli confounded completeness with
interrogative status: both the lexicosyntactic and the prosodic
cues to completeness created interrogative utterances, whereas
the cues to incompleteness created declarative utterances. Previous work suggests that infants are already sensitive to lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues to questionhood by age two, and
that they treat interrogatives differently from declaratives (Lexicosyntax: Shi et al., 2006; Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013; Geffen
and Mintz, 2014; Prosody: Soderstrom et al., 2011; Combined
cues: Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013; Geffen and Mintz, 2012).
This pattern continues through adulthood; adults in conversation also give special attention to questions (or other acts eliciting
a response; Stivers and Rossano, 2010). In our study, the lexicosyntactic cues to questionhood (subject-auxiliary inversion and
do-insertion in English) appeared earlier in the utterance than
the prosodic cue to questionhood (final high rise). Therefore, it
is possible that children weigh lexicosyntactic cues over prosodic
cues simply because the lexicosyntactic cues appear earlier than
the prosodic ones in the utterances—not because they find lexicosyntactic cues more informative or more important overall.
Because our lexicosyntactically complete targets were always formatted as questions (whereas our lexicosyntactically incomplete
targets were always formatted as declaratives), the main effect
of lexicosyntax could therefore have been driven by a higher
response pressure for questions vs. declaratives, instead of for
lexicosyntactic complete vs. incompleteness. The current results
leave which lexicosyntactic cues toddlers used for prediction—
completeness, interrogativity, or a combination of the two—as an
open question for future research.
As they stand, the current results add to the evidence that
toddlers not only distinguish between interrogative and declarative word order (Geffen and Mintz, 2014), but that they are
also sensitive to the difference in function between declarative
and interrogative utterances. As seen in similar work (Casillas
and Frank, 2012, 2013) toddlers made more anticipatory gaze
switches after interrogatives compared to declaratives, suggesting that they expect the addressee to reply when a question is
(lexicosyntactically) introduced.
A second explanation for toddlers’ use of lexicosyntactic
cues over prosodic ones is that the lexicosyntactic cues to turn
completeness were more consistent in their interpretation (and
therefore more reliable) compared to the prosodic cues to turn
completeness. Although we took care to select prosodic cues
that are relatively consistent and prototypical in signaling a
speaker switch (high rising terminal contours to signal interrogativity), rising pitch at prosodic boundaries can, in principle, signal
multiple different meanings. There is no one-to-one mapping
between intonational contours and their pragmatic function in
conversational contexts. Thus, the form-function mappings for
prosodic cues may have been less straightforward compared to
the mappings for lexicosyntactic cues.
A third, related, explanation derives from a difference in
the pragmatic felicity of the two partially complete conditions (incomplete prosody and incomplete syntax): the incomplete

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

prosody condition is less marked than the incomplete syntax condition. In natural conversation, it is common for lexicosyntactically complete phases to lack prosodic boundaries (e.g., when
the syntactic phrase optionally continues beyond the first possible
completion point). But questioning contours rarely occur when
lexicosyntax is incomplete, unless they are specifically conditioned by contexts where (a) the addressee is making a repair
(Did you mean to say, “That’s a very high”?) or (b) the speaker
is trying to elicit a sentence completion from the addressee, as
parents often do with young children during word-elicitation
games (e.g., “A pig says ‘oink’ and a cow says?”) As a consequence,
it might have been more difficult to understand the incomplete
syntax target sentences compared to the incomplete prosody sentences, thereby explaining the fewer anticipatory gaze switches
in the incomplete syntax condition without any reference to cue
dominance.
A fourth explanation is that prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues
are used differently to signal linguistic function, either from
the point of view of the type of linguistic information being
conveyed, or the extent of its predictive domain in conversational interaction. Although many studies have shown that
children are capable of perceptually distinguishing the types of
intonational contours used in the current study (even before
the acquisition of segmental and syntactic structure; Snow and
Balog, 2002), it is unclear how much of the prosodic system
can be acquired before children also master other aspects of
the linguistic system. The acquisition of an intonational system involves much more than the ability to produce and discriminate rising and falling pitch movements. Children must
also be able to map pitch contours to functional meanings.
This involves learning the language’s inventory of phonologically distinct intonational contours (e.g., rising, falling, risingfalling, etc. . . ), figuring out what their linguistic and paralinguistic functions are (e.g., rising for interrogativity, but also
continuation, etc. . . ), determining how they are realized within
utterances (e.g., throughout a phrase, or only in the accented
syllable), and finding out what determines variation in their
phonetic implementation (e.g., interactions between perceived
pitch and fundamental frequency during vowel production).
These aspects depend, to a large extent, on other components
of the language, namely: metrics, segmental structure, morphosyntax, semantics, information structure, and pragmatics.
Therefore, the full acquisition of the prosodic system must be
closely intertwined with the development of these other components (cf. Snow, 1994; Oller, 2000). Without these other components, children’s predictive prosodic processing is likely to be
limited.
Although children get an early start in acquiring prosodic
knowledge (compared to lexicosyntactic knowledge), current evidence supports the idea that the acquisition of a full-fledged
prosodic system takes many years. While certain aspects of intonational function are acquired in early infancy (e.g., speech
act discrimination: Galligan, 1987; Marcos, 1987; Konopczynski, 1995; Prieto and Vanrell, 2007), others remaining elusive
even for teenagers (e.g., some implications of nucleus placement and intonation grouping; Cruttenden, 1985). Intonational
development has been found to correlate with grammatical

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 288

Lammertink et al.

development (e.g., Snow, 1994) and vocabulary size (Chen and
Fikkert, 2007). Moreover, recent evidence suggests that children only process prosodic information as intonational phrases
once they have acquired a certain amount of syntactic knowledge (phrasal structure; Männel and Friederici, 2010). But it
may also be the case that emerging intonation is largely independent of grammatical development, at least for some children
(Prieto and Vanrell, 2007).
This explanation extends to the possible predictive value of
the prosodic information in our stimuli. The general finding that
children’s sensitivity to prosodic cues precedes their sensitivity
to lexicosyntactic cues has primarily been attested in experimental tasks that tap into more localized functions of prosodic cues,
and tend to focus on processing that happens below the level of
the utterance (e.g., word segmentation; Nazzi et al., 1998; Grossmann et al., 2005; Christophe et al., 2008). Compared to utterance comprehension in conversational interaction, these experimental tasks operate at a different level of linguistic structure
and therefore are likely to utilize somewhat different speech processing mechanisms. Prosodic comprehension in conversational
contexts may be substantially different than in experimental contexts, since it is used and understood with interactive goals in
mind.
Relatedly, not all prosodic cues are equally useful for
predicting upcoming linguistic structure. Prosodic information
in isolated linguistic forms, such as a pause or a change in
pitch contour, signals a concurrent event (e.g., a syllable with
a high pitch as being stressed). In contrast, prosodic information in conversation can also be used to signal upcoming events.
More specifically, it can be used to predict upcoming prosodic
phrase boundaries that can help, in turn, to pick out the intended
speech act (e.g., questions vs. non-questions) and to anticipate upcoming turn structure. The use of prosodic information
to make predictions in conversation requires that the listener
both recognize prosodic phrase boundaries and map prosodic
contours onto the multitude of possible pragmatic meanings.
Evidently, the required linguistic knowledge that underpins
the predictive use and interpretation of prosodic information
becomes available to children eventually. We therefore suggest
that at least some lexicosyntactic information is necessary to put
prosodic information to full use in predicting upcoming turn
structure during conversation (see also Männel and Friederici,
2010).
This fourth explanation also helps us to interpret the mixed
evidence in prior studies about the use of prosodic information for predictive processing (Casillas and Frank, 2012, 2013;
Keitel et al., 2013; Keitel and Daum, 2015). Casillas and Frank
(2013) found an early, more global role of prosody in turn prediction for 1- and 2-year-olds. In their study, children’s predictions only substantially improved with age for utterances
with lexically-realized question markers. But, importantly, children still made the most anticipatory gaze switches when both
prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues were available, suggesting that
prosodic knowledge works together with lexicosyntactic information in predicting upcoming turn structure. In Keitel et al.
s’ (2013) study, only 36-month-olds were able to anticipate
upcoming speaker changes and, when they did, they anticipated

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

speaker changes better when intonation was available. Their finding is consistent with the idea that 36-month-olds use both
lexicosyntactic and intonational information to predict upcoming speaker changes: 36-month-old children have acquired a substantial amount of lexicosyntactic knowledge that they can use
to parse and comprehend intonation, thereby helping them to
predict upcoming speaker changes. Adult controls in the same
experiment also anticipated upcoming speaker changes, even
without the benefit of intonation. But, because other prosodic
cues were still present in the pitch-flattened stimuli, the adults in
that experiment could have used alternative sources of prosodic
information (final lengthening, stress and duration) to make predictions based on prosodic structure, even without intonational
contours.

Turn-Projection in a More Natural Context
One of the goals of the study was to investigate the relative
weight of lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues in full-signal speech.
Prior studies have primarily used phonetic manipulation to
remove lexicosyntactic (low-pass filter) and prosodic information (pitch- and duration-resynthesis Casillas and Frank, 2013;
Keitel et al., 2013; Keitel and Daum, 2015). One other study
used more natural speech materials to control for the presence of lexical cues, but did not control for prosody (Casillas and Frank, 2012). The current study is then the first to
test the relative weight of lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues to
turn transition in unfiltered, unsynthesized, and thus acoustically full, speech. The current results show that our splicing
method is sufficient for investigating the use of lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues on turn prediction in both adults and
toddlers.
Though we used full-signal speech, we did not aim for completely realistic stimuli. Instead, by using full-signal speech (like
the speech in children’s natural environment) we aimed for a
balance of experimental control and increased ecological validity. Future studies could further improve the naturalness of the
stimuli by making all recording stimuli in spontaneous interactive contexts, instead of pre-scripting the utterances. Read speech
differs from natural speech in its prosodic properties in that it
has a lower articulation rate, different pause structure (Barik,
1977), and wider pitch range (Eskénazi, 1992) than spontaneous
speech. These properties are, in fact, shared with characteristics of
infant-directed speech (IDS), the register that used in the present
study (Fernald and Simon, 1984; Fernald et al., 1989). However,
other prosodic characteristics of read speech are not common
in IDS, such as fewer hesitations and fewer rising movements
(Levin et al., 1982).
In sum, we showed that the relative weight of linguistic cues
in toddler and adult turn projection can be investigated with
relatively natural-sounding scripted conversations. Using this
technique, we showed that adults and toddlers use both lexicosyntactic and prosodic cues for turn projection, but that lexicosyntactic cues are weighed over prosodic cues when the two
are pitted against each other. The results present a challenge
for future work to tease apart which lexicosyntactic cues children attend to in making their predictions, and how their use of
different cues changes throughout development.

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 289

Lammertink et al.

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant INTERACT #269484 to Stephen C. Levinson), the Fundatie van de Vrijvrouwe van Renswoude (to I.
Lammertink), and the Radboud University Honours Academy

References
Bakker, M., Kochukhova, O., and von Hofsten, C. (2011). Development of social
perception: a conversation study of 6-, 12- and 36-month-old children. Infant
Behav. Dev. 34, 363–370. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2011.03.001
Barik, H. (1977). Cross-linguistic study of temporal characteristics of different
types of speech materials. Lang. Speech 20, 116–126.
Bates, D., Maechler, M., and Bolker, B. (2012). lme4: Linear Mixed-Effects Models
Using S4 Classes. R package version 0.999999-0. Available online at: http://cran.
rproject.org/package=lme4
Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2012). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer Software Manual]. Available online at: http://www.praag.org ([Computer
Program] Version 5.3.56)
Bögels, S., Magyari, L., and Levinson, S. C. (2014). “Neural correlates of speech
preparation in interactive turn-taking: an early start?” in Poster Presented at
Society for Neurobiology of Language 2014 (Amsterdam).
Bruner, J. S. (1975). From communication to language- a psychological perspective.
Cognition 3, 255–287. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(74)90012-2
Casillas, M., Bobb, S., and Clark, E. (in press). Turn-taking, timing and planning in
early language acquisition. J. Child Lang.
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2012). “Cues to boundary prediction in adults
and preschoolers,” in Paper presented at the Proceedings of SemDial 2012: The
16th workshop on Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (Paris: Universite
Paris-Diderot).
Casillas, M., and Frank, M. C. (2013). “The development of predictive processes in
children’s discourse understanding,” in Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting
of Cognitive Science Society (Austin, TX).
Caspers, J. (2001). “Testing the perceptual relevance of syntactic completion and
melodic configuration for turn-taking in Dutch,” in Paper presented at the
Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and
Technology (Aalborg).
Caspers, J. (2003). Local speech melody as a limiting factor in the turn-taking
system in Dutch. J. Phon. 31, 251–276. doi: 10.1016/S0095-4470(03)00007-X
Chen, A., and Fikkert, P. (2007). “Intonation of early two-word utterances in
Dutch,” in Proceedings of the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences XVI,
(Saarbrucken), 315–320.
Christophe, A., Millotte, S., Bernal, S., and Lidz, J. (2008). Bootstrapping
lexical and syntactic acquisition. Lang. Speech 51(Pt 1–2), 61–75. doi:
10.1177/00238309080510010501
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2012). “Some truths and untruths about final intonation
in conversational questions,” in Questions, ed J. P. de Ruiter (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 123–145.
Cruttenden, A. (1985). Intonation comprehension in 10-years-olds. J. Child Lang.
12, 643–661. doi: 10.1017/S030500090000670X
de Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., and Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a
speaker’s turn: a cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language 82, 515–535.
doi: 10.1353/lan.2006.0130
Dryer, M. S. (2013). “Order of subject and verb,” in The World Atlas of Language
Structures Online, eds M. S. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (Leipzig: Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). Available online at: http://wals.info/
chapter/82 (Accessed July 4, 2014).
Duncan, S. (1972). Some signals and rules for speaking turns in conversations.
J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 23, 283. doi: 10.1037/h0033031
Englert, C. (2010). Questions and responses in Dutch conversations. J. Pragmat.
42, 2666–2684. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.005
Ervin-Tripp, S. (1979). “Children’s verbal turn-taking,” in Developmental Pragmatics, eds E. Ochs and B. B. Schieffelin (New York, NY: Academic Press),
391–414.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

(Beyond the Frontiers, to I. Lammertink). We extend our gratitude to those who helped recruit Dutch and English toddlers.
We also thank the students that helped voice and videotape the materials, and thank Elma Hilbrink and Stephen
C. Levinson for their feedback on earlier versions of this
paper.

Eskénazi, M. (1992). “Changing speech styles: strategies in read speech and casual
and careful spontaneous speech,” in Second International Conference on Spoken
Language Processing (Banff, AB).
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J. P., et al.
(1993). The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: User’s Guide
and Technical Manuals. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brokes Publishing.
Fernald, A., and Simon, T. (1984). Expanded intonation contours
in mother’s speech to newborns. Dev. Psychol. 27, 104–113. doi:
10.1037/0012-1649.20.1.104
Fernald, A., Swingley, D., and Pinto, J. P. (2001). When half a word is enough:
infants can recognize spoken words using partial phonetic information. Child
Dev. 72, 1003–1015. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00331
Fernald, A., Taeschner, T., Dunn, J., Papousek, M., de Boysson-Bardies, B., and
Fukui, I. (1989). A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers’ and fathers’ speech to preverbal infants. J. Child Lang. 16, 477–501. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900010679
Ford, C. E., and Thompson, S. A. (1996). “Interactional units in conversation:
syntactic, intonational and pragmatic resources for the management of turns,”
in Interaction and Grammar, eds R. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S. Thompson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 134–184.
Galligan, R. (1987). Intonation with single words: purposive an grammatical use.
J. Child Lang. 14, 1–21. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900012708
Garvey, C. (1984). Children’s Talk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Garvey, C., and Berninger, G. (1981). Timing and turn-taking in children’s’
conversations. Discourse Process. 4, 27–57. doi: 10.1080/01638538109544505
Geffen, S., and Mintz, T. H. (2012). “Seven-months-olds’ discrimination of statements and questions,” in Paper Presented at the Proceedings of the 36th Annual
Boston University Conference on Language Development (Boston,CA).
Geffen, S., and Mintz, T. H. (2014). Can you believe it? 12-Month-olds use word
order to distinguish between declaratives and polar interrogatives. Lang. Learn.
Dev. 1, 15. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2014.951595
Gervain, J., and Werker, J. F. (2013). Prosody cues word order in 7-month-old
bilingual infants. Nat. Commun. 4:1490. doi: 10.1038/ncomms2430
Ginsburg, G. P., and Kilbourne, B. K. (1988). Emergence of vocal alternation in mother-infant interchanges. J. Child Lang. 15, 221–235. doi:
10.1017/S0305000900012344
Gleitman, L. R., and Wanner, E. (1982). “The state of the state of the art,” in Language Acquisition, eds E. Wanner and L. R. Gleitman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 3–48.
Grabe, E., and Post, B. (2004). “Intonational variation in the British Isles,” in Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline, eds G. Sampson and D.
McCarthy (London; New York: Continuum International), 474–481.
Grossmann, T., Striano, T., and Friederici, A. D. (2005). Infants’ electric
brain responses to emotional prosody. Neuroreport 16, 1825–1828. doi:
10.1097/01.wnr.0000185964.34336.b1
Gunlogson, C. (2001). “Rising declarative questions,” in Paper Presented at the
Proceedings of the Formal Pragmatics Conference (Berlin).
Haan, J. (2002). Speaking of Questions: an Exploration of Dutch Question Intonation. Dissertation, University of Utrecht, Utrecht.
Hirvenkari, L., Ruusuvuori, J., Saarinen, V.-M., Kivioja, M., and Peräkylä, A.
(2013). Influence of turn-taking in a two-person conversation on the gaze of
a viewer. PLoS ONE 8:e71569. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071569
Höhle, B., and Weissenborn, J. (2003). German-learning infants’ ability to detect
unstressed closed-class elements in continuous speech. Dev. Sci. 6, 122–127.
doi: 10.1111/1467-7687.00261
Holler, J., and Kendrick, K. H. (2015). Unaddressed participants’ gaze in
multi-person interaction:optimizing recipiency. Front. Psychol. 6:98. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00098

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 290

Lammertink et al.

Jusczyk, P. W. (1997). The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT
press.
Keitel, A., and Daum, M. M. (2015). The use of intonation for turn anticipation in
observed conversations without visual signals as source of information. Front.
Psychol. Lang. Sci. 6:108. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00108
Keitel, A., Prinz, W., Friederici, A. D., von Hofsten, C., and Daum, M. M.
(2013). Perception of conversations: the importance of semantics and intonation in children’s development. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 116, 264–277. doi:
10.1016/j.jecp.2013.06.005
Konopczynski, G. (1995). “A developmental model of acquisition of rhythmic
patterns: results from a cross-linguistic study,” in Proceedings of the XIIIth
International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 4 (Stockholm).
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT press.
Levin, H., Schaffer, C. A., and Snow, C. (1982). The prosodic and paralinguistic
features of reading and telling stories. Lang. Speech 25, 43–54.
Levinson, S. C. (2013). “Action formation and ascription,” in The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, eds T. Stivers and J. Sidnell (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell),
103–130.
Magyari, L., and de Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Prediction of turn-ends based on anticipation of upcoming words. Front. Psychol. 3:376. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00376
Männel, C., and Friederici, A. D. (2010). Intonational phrase structure processing at differentstages of syntax acquisition: ERP studies in 2-,3-, and
6-year-old children. Dev. Sci. 14, 786–798. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.
01025.x
Marcos, H. (1987). Communicative functions of pitch range and pitch direction in
infants. J. Child Lang. 14, 255–268. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900012915
Morgan, J., and Demuth, K. (1996). “Signal to syntax: an overview,” in Signal
to Syntax: Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition, eds J.
Morgan and K. Demuth (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbauw Associates), 1–22.
Nazzi, T., Bertoncini, J., and Mehler, J. (1998). Language discrimination by newborns: towards an understanding of the role of rhythm. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum.
Percept. Perform. 24, 756–766. doi: 10.1037/0096-1523.24.3.756
Oller, D. K. (2000). The Emergence of the Speech Capacity. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum and Associates.
Pisoni, D. B. (1981). Speeded classification of natural and synthetic speech in a
lexical decisiontask. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 70, S98. doi: 10.1121/1.2019150
Prieto, P., and Vanrell, M. M. (2007). “Early intonational development in Catalan,”
in Proceedings of the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences XVI, eds J.
Trouvain and W. J. Barry (Dudweiler: Pirrot GmbH).
R Development Core Team. (2013). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical
Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available online
at: http://www.R-project.org
Rossano, F., Brown, P., and Levinson, S. C. (2009). “Gaze, questioning and culture,” in Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives, ed J. Sidnell (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge), 187–249. doi: 10.1017/CBO978051163
5670.008

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org

Linguistic cues in toddlers’ turn predictions

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language 5, 696–735. doi:
10.1353/lan.1974.0010
Shi, R., Werker, J. F., and Cutler, A. (2006). Recognition and representation
of function words in English-learning infants. Infancy 10, 187–198. doi:
10.1207/s15327078in1002_5
Shi, R., Werker, J. F., and Morgan, J. L. (1999). Newborn infants’ sensitivity to
perceptual cues to lexical and grammatical words. Cognition 72, B11–B21. doi:
10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00047-5
Snow, C. E. (1977). The development of conversation between mothers and babies.
J. Child Lang. 4, 1–22. doi: 10.1017/S0305000900000453
Snow, D. (1994). Phrase-final syllable lengthening and intonation in early child
speech. J. Speech Hear. Res. 37, 831–840. doi: 10.1044/jshr.3704.831
Snow, D., and Balog, H. L. (2002). Do children produce the melody before the
words? A review of developmental intonation research. Lingua 112, 1025–1058.
doi: 10.1016/S0024-3841(02)00060-8
Soderstrom, M., Ko, E., and Nevzorova, U. (2011). It’s a question? Infants attend
differently to yes/no questions and declaratives. Infant Behav. Dev. 34, 107–110.
doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2010.10.003
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Helnemann, T., et al.
(2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10587–10592. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Stivers, T., and Rossano, F. (2010). Mobilizing response. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact.
43, 3–31. doi: 10.1080/08351810903471258
Thorgrímsson, G., Fawcett, C., and Liszkowski, U. (2015). 1- and 2-year-olds’
expectations about third-part communicative actions. Infant Behav. Dev. 39,
53–66. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2015.02.002
Tice, M., and Henetz, T. (2011). “Turn-boundary projection: looking ahead,” in
Proceedings of the 33nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Boston,
MA).
Wichmann, A., and Caspers, J. (2001). “Melodic cues to turn-taking in English:
evidence from perception,” in Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2nd
SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue (Aalborg). doi: 10.3115/1118078.
1118103
Zink, I., and Lejaegere, M. (2003). Aanpassingen en hernormering van de
MacArthur CDI’s van Fenson et al., 1993. Acco.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2015 Lammertink, Casillas, Benders, Post and Fikkert. This is an openaccess article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted,
provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use,
distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

April 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 495 | 291

ADVANTAGES OF PUBLISHING IN FRONTIERS

FAST PUBLICATION

COLLABORATIVE
PEER-REVIEW

Average 90 days
from submission
to publication

Designed to be rigorous –
yet also collaborative, fair and
constructive

RESEARCH NETWORK
Our network
increases readership
for your article

OPEN ACCESS

TRANSPARENT

GLOBAL SPREAD

Articles are free to read,
for greatest visibility

Editors and reviewers
acknowledged by name
on published articles

Six million monthly
page views worldwide

COPYRIGHT TO AUTHORS

IMPACT METRICS

SUPPORT

No limit to
article distribution
and re-use

Advanced metrics
track your
article’s impact

By our Swiss-based
editorial team

EPFL Innovation Park · Building I · 1015 Lausanne · Switzerland
T +41 21 510 17 00 · info@frontiersin.org · frontiersin.org