Sound Patterns and Linguistic Structures at the Transition Space in Conversation
Final Report Abstract
Interaction is fundamental to social behaviour, and turn-taking is an essential component of interaction. Human interaction is unique in that it makes use of language as a medium, most notably in everyday conversation. We may take for granted that we are easily able to engage in turn-taking during a conversation, but turn-taking has a complex systematic organization, and people who are participating in conversations are able to start speaking quickly when other speakers finish—so quickly that human cognitive abilities could not achieve such speed unless people are able make predictions about when and how other people’s conversational turns will end. This project investigated at what times during conversation these predictions become relevant—that is, when a possible “turn-transition space” arises during a given speaker’s turn— and what kinds of linguistic information listeners use in order to make such predictions. In particular, we investigated prosodic variation: that is, how loud or fast, or with what kinds of melodic patterns, people speak in conversation. We found that melodic variation is particularly relevant for German speakers, who use their speech melody to signal to an interlocutor if they are done speaking or whether they have more to say. In Swedish, melodic variation seems to be used less to communicate intentions about turn-taking, but how fast or slow they speak appears to influence whether listeners think a speaker is finished speaking or not. Melodic and speed variations occurring about half a second before a speaker finishes speaking appear to be particularly important in conversations, thus emphasizing the very quick decisions or predictions that conversational participants make about what will happen next in the conversation. The differences between German and Swedish also highlight the fact that that speakers of different languages have different strategies for making sure their conversations run smoothly.
Publications
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The time course of pitch variation towards possible places of speaker transition in German and Swedish. 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 112-116. ISCA.
Feindt, Kathrin; Rossi, Martina & Zellers, Margaret
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A multimodal account of listener feedback in face-to-face interactions. In Proceedings of ICPhS 2023, Prague, Czechia, pp. 4120-4124.
Rossi, M.; Schröer, M.; Ludusan, B. & Zellers, M.
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An overview of discourse clicks in Central Swedish. Interspeech 2022, 3423-3427. ISCA.
Zellers, Margaret
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Individual variation in F0 marking of turn-taking in natural conversation in German and Swedish. Speech Prosody 2022, 185-189. ISCA.
Rossi, Martina; Feindt, Kathrin & Zellers, Margaret
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Perception of F0 movements towards potential turn boundaries in German and Swedish conversation: background and methods for an eye-tracking study. In Proceedings of FONETIK 2022, Stockholm, Sweden, 13-15 June 2022.
Rossi, M.; Feindt, K. & Zellers, M.
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Cues to next-speaker projection in conversational Swedish: Evidence from reaction times. INTERSPEECH 2023, 1040-1044. ISCA.
Feindt, Kathrin; Rossi, Martina; Esfandiari-Baiat, Ghazaleh; Ekström, Axel G. & Zellers, Margaret
