Turn-taking in human communicative interaction

Description

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 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.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Similar books

• 

  The Psychology of Language and Communication

  By Geoffrey Beattie, Andrew W Ellis

  This is a classic edition of Geoffrey Beattie’s and Andrew Ellis’ influential introduction to the psychology of human language and communication, now including a new reflective introduction from the authors.

• 

  Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet

  By Ian Hutchby

  Goodwin, M. H. 1990: He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organisation Among Black Children. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Greatbatch, D. 1988: A turn-taking system for British news interviews. Language in Society, 17, 401—30.

• 

  Handbook of Interpersonal Communication

  By Eija Ventola, Gerd Antos

  When interaction gets off the track, linguistic miscommunication may also destroy social relationships. This volume is essentially concerned with this fine-tuning in discourse, and how it is achieved among various interactant groups.

• 

  Communication Theory

  By C. David Mortensen

  The breadth and scope of subject matter is adaptable to a number of approaches to the first course in communication, whether theoretical, practical, contemporary, or traditional in orientation.The framework of this book introduces five ...

• 

  Language Processing

  By Simon Garrod, Martin Pickering

  Language Processing questions what happens when we process language - what mental operations occur during processing and how they are organised over time.

• 

  Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems

  By Björn Granström, D. House, I. Karlsson

  This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network ...

• 

  Duetting and Turn-Taking Patterns of Singing Mammals: From Genes to Vocal Plasticity, and Beyond

  By Charles T. Snowdon, Patrice Adret, Dena Jane Clink

  ... human communicative interaction. Front. Psychol. 6:1919. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01919 Horowitz, A., Barazany, D ... Communicative deficits in agenesis of the corpus callosum: nonliteral language and affective prosody. Brain Lang. 85 ...

• 

  Communicating & Relating: Constituting Face in Everyday Interacting

  By Robert B. Arundale

  Communicating & Relating moves beyond this work to offer an account of how both relating and face emerge in everyday talk and conduct: what comprises human communicating, what defines human social systems, how the social and the individual ...

• 

  Turn-Taking in Japanese Conversation: A Study in Grammar and Interaction

  By Hiroko Tanaka

  This book explores the interpretation of grammar and turn-taking in Japanese talk-in-interaction from the perspective of conversation analysis.

• 

  Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines

  By Ipke Wachsmuth, Gunther Knoblich, Manuela Lenzen

  This book takes a new look at recent empirical findings in the cognitive and neurosciences, showing that the traditional approach is insufficient, and presenting a new interdisciplinary perspective, the Embodied Communication perspective.