The Timing and Construction of Preference: A Quantitative Study

Abstract

Conversation-analytic research has argued that the timing and construction of preferred responding actions (e.g., acceptances) differ from that of dispreferred responding actions (e.g., rejections), potentially enabling early response prediction by recipients. We examined 195 preferred and dispreferred responding actions in telephone corpora and found that the timing of the most frequent cases of each type did not differ systematically. Only for turn transitions of 700 ms or more was the proportion of dispreferred responding actions clearly greater than that of preferreds. In contrast, an analysis of the timing that included turn formats (i.e., those with or without qualification) revealed clearer differences. Small departures from a normal gap duration decrease the likelihood of a preferred action in a preferred turn format (e.g., a simple "yes"). We propose that the timing of a response is best understood as a turn-constructional feature, the first virtual component of a preferred or dispreferred turn format.

Respiratory Belts and Whistles: A Preliminary Study of Breathing Acoustics for Turn-Taking

“…Crucially, even though it is known that human judges are very good at detecting respiratory pauses in speech [12], few studies have addressed the ways in which breathing sounds enter into the processes of speech perception and communication. What little is known suggests that breath sounds improve listeners recall of synthetic speech [13], that they convey meanings linked to expressing preference [14], emotional content of speech [15], physical effort [16], and that they are employed for marking text structure in read texts [17]. Results in [18] also indicate that coarticulatory information in breath sounds is used for speaker normalisation (but see [19]).…”

A Conversation Analysis Approach to Attributable Silence in Moroccan Conversation

“…This he interprets as a decline in A2, A3 and A4, all of which can be classified as reproaches for the decline, and in A5, the decline is overtly expressed (you don't bless me; you don't). Kendrick and Torreira's (2015) study of preferred/dispreferred responses to invitations, offers, requests, suggestions, and proposals also provide evidence that an inter-turn silence that departs relatively largely from the normal or standard gap, one ranging between 0.7 and 0.8 sec, indicates that "rejection is imminent" (p. 287) . (It is generally agreed that the norm ranges between 0.1 and 0.3 sec; see, for example, Levinson &Kendrick, 2015).…”

“…A request, for instance, is either granted or rejected. Grantings tend to be unmarked and performed without delay whereas rejections are usually characterized by opposite features (for more details, see Shegloff et al, 1977, Schegloff, 2007, and Kendrick & Torreira, 2015. One last example of the just mentioned participants' orientation is present in (8), another request sequence involving a mother M, her son A, and daughter F. A in A1 requests his mother for her blessing (after he shouted at her), which is highly valued in the Islamic culture, but she keeps silent even after F's appreciation of the request in F1.…”

Sequence recompletion: A practice for managing lapses in conversation

“…Silence may be a constitutive part of a practice (e.g., Kendrick, 2015;Kendrick and Torreira, 2015). For sequence recompletion, a natural question is how long a lapse goes on before participants end it.…”