27 Sep 2005

Jan-Peter de Ruiter (MPI Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)

Listeners in a conversation do not only have to determine what they are going to say next, but also when to say it. From research in Conversation Analysis and my own quantitative work on conversation it is clear that listeners have an uncanny ability to anticipate the moment the current speaker will have finished their turn. This allows them to start their own contribution with hardly any temporal gap or overlap between two succesive turns. We have performed classical button press experiments involving fragments from natural conversations to determine which cues listener's use to anticipate, or 'project' the end of a speaker's turn. Specifically, we have focussed on two sources of information: a) lexico-syntax, and b) intonation. Perhaps surprisingly, we have found that having access to the lexico-syntax is both sufficient and necessary for accurate end-of-turn projection, while intonation is neither necessary nor sufficient.

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