Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation

By Tanya Stivers, N. Enfield, Penelope Brown, C. Englert, M. Hayashi, Trine Heinemann, G. Hoymann, F. Rossano, Jan Peter De Ruiter, Kyung-Eun Yoon and 3 more. 2009

1,294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

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Citations in the corpus

Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling (2022, background): “It is interesting to note that all models, except DLM-1, manage to capture the empirical fact that intra-turn pauses tend to be longer than between-turn gaps (Brady, 1968; Ten Bosch et al., 2005; Heldner and Edlund, 2010).”
What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? (2015, background): “It has long been noted that, during natural conversation, we often seem to know when to take our turn, with virtually no gap or overlap between exchanges (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Stivers et al., 2009).”
Politeness and language (2015, background): “Another new direction is the emerging emphasis on the cooperative basis of human sociality and on the interactional underpinnings to language, its evolution, and its ethological base; Goody (1995), Enfield and Levinson (2006), Tomasello (2008, 2009), and Stivers et al. (2009) can be mentioned here.”
Gaze Direction Signals Response Preference in Conversation (2017, background): “…the accomplishment of the activity, a preferred response, the other may be delayed by silence or turn-initial particles, have a relatively complex design, and forestall the accomplishment of the activity, a dispreferred response (Pomerantz & Heritage, 2013; Schegloff, 2007; Stivers et al., 2009).”
Dialog as interpersonal synergy (2014, background): “Turn taking is a remarkable ability of humans, and seemingly a universal property of human language (Sidnell & Enfield, 2012; Stivers et al., 2009).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “…of words that include information about phonological structure, syntactic category, and meaning: “… syntactic structure is merely the characterization of the process of constructing a logical form, rather than a representational level of structure that actually needs to be built…” (p. xi).”
Judgments Concerning the Valence of Inter-Turn Silence Across Speakers of American English, Italian, and Japanese (2011, background): “This supports emerging evidence of a widely shared social orientation to silence as problematic (Stivers et al., 2009).”
GPT-4o System Card (2024, background): “1 Introduction GPT-4o GPT-4o can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time[2] in a conversation.”
Some Other “Uh(m)”s (2010, background): “…that is, the resulting organization of the speaking turn as a unit of interaction, and its component parts, which we refer to as turn-constructional units (TCUs; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 1996b, and for validation across 10 languages and cultures, see Stivers et al., 2009).”
Fluency in Second Language Testing: Insights From Different Disciplines (2018, background): “Recent research has shown that the mechanisms found in mostly English conversations hold crosslinguistically and can be seen as universals (Dingemanse et al., 2015; Stivers et al., 2009).”
Investigating Speech Features for Continuous Turn-Taking Prediction Using LSTMs (2018, positive): “In studies of turn-switch timings, a modal gap of 200ms has been found to exist cross-culturally [2].”
Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language (2015, background): “Stivers et al. (2009) looked at 10 languages from around the world, including smaller, unwritten languages, and found rather fast transitions in polar question contexts, with means between 7 and 468 ms, and modes from 0 to 200 ms.”