Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language

By Stephen C. Levinson, Francisco Torreira. 2015

543 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

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Citations in the corpus

Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling (2022, background): “Decades-long research on conversation analysis (Duncan, 1972; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 2000; Gravano and Hirschberg, 2011; Levinson and Torreira, 2015; Ward, 2019) has shown that human turn-taking relies on a variety of complex signals, or cues, including prosodic cues, linguistic cues and…”
Investigating Speech Features for Continuous Turn-Taking Prediction Using LSTMs (2018, unknown): “Considering that this 200ms value is close to the limit of human response time to any stimulus [3], it supports the projection theory proposed by Sacks [1], that efﬁcient communication involves forming predictions with regards to when turn-switches will occur.”
Neural signatures of syntactic variation in speech planning (2021, unknown): “, for rapid response planning in conversation [78,92,93], would then be more important for language evolution than the increase in neural activity we found under aligned expression and the interference effects that this might generate.”