Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations

Abstract

This paper explores durational aspects of pauses, gaps and overlaps in three different conversational corpora with a view to challenge claims about precision timing in turn-taking. Distributions of pause, gap and overlap durations in conversations are presented, and methodological issues regarding the statistical treatment of such distributions are discussed. The results are related to published minimal response times for spoken utterances and thresholds for detection of acoustic silences in speech. It is shown that turn-taking is generally less precise than is often claimed by researchers in the field of conversation analysis or interactional linguistics. These results are discussed in the light of their implications for models of timing in turn-taking, and for interaction control models in speech technology. In particular, it is argued that the proportion of speaker changes that could potentially be triggered by information immediately preceding the speaker change is large enough for reactive interaction controls models to be viable in speech technology.

Overlapping speech, utterance duration and affective content in HHI and HCI - An comparison

“…We could show that in both datasets overlapping speech occurs frequently enough to be analyzed with a share of 18.9% for HHI and 12.3% for HCI. For the investigated HHI, this share is in-line with the results of other research groups [11], [33]. The amount of overlap in HCI is a bit lower but still sufficient.…”

Planning versus comprehension in turn-taking: Fast responders show reduced anticipatory processing of the question

“…However, estimates from psycholinguistic picture naming studies indicate that speakers need at least about 600 ms to plan a single word (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004) and much longer (about 1500 ms) to plan a simple sentence (Griffin and Bock, 2000). These figures are clearly much higher than the typical time between two turns at talk in conversation (e.g., Heldner and Edlund, 2010;Levinson and Torreira, 2015;Sacks et al, 1974). To respond with the quick timing typical of conversation (0-200 ms, e.g., Stivers et al, 2009), responders must therefore begin planning their responses while the previous turn is still unfolding.…”

Integrating Corpus-Linguistic and Conversation-Analytic Transcription in XML: The Case of Backchannels and Overlap in Storytelling Interaction

“…ten Bosch et al (2005) found overlap to account for 44% of speaker changes in face-toface conversation. Heldner and Edlund (2010) report 40% of speaker-transitions involving overlaps. Only in Levinson and Torreira (2015) the proportion of overlap was clearly lower, with 30% of transitions occurring in overlap.…”

“…This finding is almost perfectly consistent with previous research. Heldner and Edlund (2010), for example, report for overlap a mean length of 610 ms and a median length of 470 ms. The findings then support the view that ''the bulk of overlaps are of short duration'' (Levinson and Torreira 2015: 4; cf.…”

“…'No overlap', however, is not to be taken as an exact acoustic quantification. As Heldner and Edlund (2010) have shown, turn transitions from one speaker to another are most commonly 200 ms long, that is, they occur after a slight gap, while the second most common type of transition is in overlap, with overlap accounting for 40% of all transitions (Heldner and Edlund 2010: 564). Cases of zero gap and zero overlap, by contrast, represented only a ''marginal part'' in Heldner and Edlund's (2010: 564) data.…”