*Gardner R and Mushin I (2015) Expanded transition spaces: the case of Garrwa. Front. Psychol.* 6*:251. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00251* Keywords: conversation analysis, transition spaces, turn-taking, Aboriginal conversation, conversation and culture

# Introduction

This report had its genesis in a project investigating Aboriginal Australian conversation in the Garrwa language, with a focus on turn-taking practices (Gardner and Mushin, 2007; Mushin and Gardner, 2009, 2011; Gardner, 2010). One observation that emerged from this study was that the pace of these conversations appeared overall to be slower than has been reported for conversation in most of the literature on turn-taking. A specific feature of this slowness was seen in the distribution of inter-turn gaps of silence—the time it took for a next speaker to begin talking when the conversational floor was free. Ethnographic reports of Australian Aboriginal conversation have suggested a tolerance for greater gaps between turns than for Anglo Australian conversation (Walsh, 1991; Eades, 2000, 2007). This prompted the question whether this perceived slower pace indicated something about the fundamental ways in which Aboriginal Australians conduct their conversations, particularly in the overall pace of the talk and timing of speaker change. One hypothesis for these extended gaps between turns is, as Walsh (1991) implied, that Aboriginal Australians are orienting to a different set of rules for conversational turn-taking than are found in those societies that have been the basis of most

**Abbreviations:** ABL, ablative; ACC, accusative; ALL, allative; BARRI, a discourse particle; CONJ, conjunction; DAT, dative; DEM, demonstrative; DS, different subject (switch reference marker); ERG, ergative; FUT, future; HAB, habitual; IMP, imperative; INTENS, intensifier; KANYI, verbal morpheme (yet to be labeled); LOC, locative; NA, a discourse particle; NEG, negative particle; PA, past tense; PURP, purposive; WA, grammatical morpheme (yet to be labeled); 1sg, first person singular; 2sg, second person singular; 1duIncl, first person dual inclusive (you and me); 3du, third person dual; 1plncl, first person plural inclusive; 1plExcl, first person plural exclusive; 3pl, third person plural.

investigations of turn-taking phenomena, starting with Sacks et al.'s (1974) seminal paper on the systematics of turn-taking using English language data. Walsh suggested that Aboriginal talk is "broadcast" to all present rather than to specific recipients, and further, that in a "non-dyadic" mode of speaking. He also claimed that Aboriginal speakers have a much greater tolerance for silence in conversation.

An alternative hypothesis is based on what Schegloff (2007) has posited as possible departures from interactional formats familiar to Western industrialized nations (which) involve what might be called "differences in the value of variables." Under this hypothesis, the basic rules for turn-taking are the same, but the lengths of time that count as silence may be calibrated differently across cultures. This suggestion has received support from a study by Stivers et al. (2009), which examined the delays (or "response offsets") in responding to polar questions across 10 languages from five continents that were different in terms of language family and culture. They established that longer delays in response were associated with four parameters: if a question was not answered rather than answered; if a question was disconfirmed rather than confirmed; if a response was verbal rather than visible (such as a head nod); and if the speaker had no gaze contact with the recipient rather than gaze contact. They found a mean response time of just over 0.2 s, but variation across languages, with Japanese the shortest at less than 0.1 s, and Danish the longest at a little under 0.5 s. The overall mode was 0 s (supporting the Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson claim reported below that turn transitions with no gap and no overlap are common), with a mode variation between 0.0 and 0.2 s across the 10 languages. They found that in all languages the response time was between zero and half a second, which they argue suggests a universal across all languages for gap minimization. They found no correlations of length of delays between closely related languages nor between similar cultures. The variations that they found in response offset times arose from what they termed "a different cultural "calibration" of delay" (p. 10590), which, they claim, has to do with the general pace of conversations and the general tempo of life in the communities in which these languages are spoken.

What we report in this paper is that that these Garrwa speakers have tolerance for silences between turns that appears to be greater than it is for English conversation, including Anglo-Australian conversation, and indeed there is some evidence (cf. Gardner, 2010) that this appears to be stronger than for any of the 10 languages reported in Stivers et al. (2009). However, we provide evidence that in some Anglo-Australian conversations, under certain situational conditions, there also appears to be a greater tolerance for lengthy interturn silences. In these conversations, couples were at home alone in the evening, engaging in "non-focused" talk (cf. Couper-Kuhlen, 2010). This leads us to the hypothesis that what we are finding is not any difference in the ways in which speakers allocate turns of talk, but rather that the circumstances in which the talk is occurring may be what is leading to "differences in the values of variables," in this case the length of interturn silences. We also find strong evidence that Aboriginal speakers of Garrwa generally adhere to the rules of turn-taking as proposed by Sacks et al. (1974).

Based on these observations, the questions we address in this paper are whether delayed onset of talk by a next speaker:

Sacks et al. (1974) proposed a set of rules that derive from two proposals: first, that a turn at talk is made up of a word, phrase or sentence that can stand alone and make full sense in the context of the conversation (a "turn constructional unit" or TCU)1 , and second, that there is a short period of time at the end of a TCU within which change of speaker is warranted by the rules (the "transition relevance place" or TRP). Where a "normal" transition-relevance place begins and ends is not often discussed explicitly in the literature, but the normal, or default space has been declared to be one "beat of silence," i.e., the time it takes to say a single syllable at normal rate (Jefferson, 1984; Schegloff, 2000). Wells and Macfarlane (1998) suggest that it extends from a final, turn-ending projecting accent in a TCU to the onset of a next speaker's talk, which may typically be about two beats, or 0.2 s2 . If someone starts speaking outside the TRP, this can be treated by participants as problematic.

There are two rules, which specify how change of speaker occurs. The first of these is divided into three parts. The first of these, rule 1a, states that if in the course of a turn the speaker of that turn selects someone to speak next, for example by naming them, by gaze, by touch or by asking a question that only one other participant has the knowledge to answer. Under such circumstances, the speaker who has been selected is obliged to begin speaking at the TRP that occurs at the end of the TCU that is in progress. The second part, rule 1b, comes into play if the current speaker does not select a next speaker, and states that at the next TRP, any speaker other than the current speaker may start speaking (or may "self-select,") and if there is more than one other participant, the first to start has rights to the floor. The third part, rule 1c, states that if no other speaker selfselects under rule 1b, then the current speaker may (but need not) continue speaking, thereby producing a second TCU in their turn. A second rule is necessary because under rule 1c, there has been no change of speaker, so in order to state how such change occurs, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson made explicit that if current speaker does continue under rule 1c, then the three parts of the first rule are recycled until change of speaker does occur.

This simple set of rules has a power that may not be immediately obvious, namely that, first, the system is built to ensure that speaker change occurs frequently, but also, second, bids for speakership need to be made with precision timing that

1 Since 1974, the notion of what constitutes a turn-constructional unit has developed further, see for example Schegloff (1996) and Ford and Thompson (1996).

2Where a "normal" transition-relevance place begins and ends is not often discussed explicitly in the literature, but the normal, or default space has been declared to be one "beat of silence," i.e., the time it takes to say a single syllable at normal rate (Jefferson, 1984; Schegloff, 2000). Wells and Macfarlane (1998) suggest that it extends from a final, turn-ending projecting accent in a TCU to the onset of a next speaker's talk, which may typically be about two beats, or 0.2 s.

requires preparation for the bid while the current TCU is still underway.

First we demonstrate that the participants in these Garrwa conversations on many occasions allocate turns very much in the way predicted by Sacks et al. (1974). Then we examine some examples of talk with expanded transition spaces, in which gaps between turns appear to be longer that Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson talk of as a normal TRP. They claim as one of their "gross observations" that speaker transitions with no gap or overlap are common, and together with transitions with slight gaps or overlaps, they make up the "vast majority of transitions" (p. 701). In the Garrwa conversations, we commonly find a tolerance for silence between turns of up to several seconds. Sometimes these silences can be accounted for by non-talk activities, such as drinking or grooming that may be distracting the speaker from the ongoing talk, but some activities, such as grooming, do not in and of themselves disable the ability to talk. We then examine whether there are differences in the length of long silences following current speaker selection of the next speaker (rule 1a) or following self-selection of next speaker (rule 1b), and we report that we do find regular differences in the length of the long silences after application of rule 1a, compared with turns after application of rule 1b. Finally, we pose the question of the degree to which these unusually long silences are a phenomenon of Aboriginal Australian interactions—and perhaps the interactions of some other indigenous peoples (cf. Scollon and Scollon, 1981; Hoymann, 2010)—or a more general practice of talk-ininteraction that derives from a lack of pressure for continuous talk, associated with situational factors such as intimates just "hanging out" with nothing particular to talk about, in familiar surroundings with no pressure to "get things done." We then begin to examine the extent to which long gaps between turns are a cultural phenomenon by examining some examples of long gaps between turns in two Anglo-Australian English language conversations.

A number of Conversation Analysts have suggested that delayed responses are regularly associated with problems in the talk. There may be talk-internal reasons for the silences, such as word searches (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987; Hayashi, 2003), attempting to gain the attention of another speaker (Goodwin, 1981), speech impairment of one or more of the participants (Goodwin, 1995b). Other delays may occur prior to dispreferred, or non-agreeing responses (Pomerantz, 1984a), or during resistance to requests (Davidson, 1984) 3 . Pomerantz (1984b) points to recipient problems due to unclear references in the prior speaker's turn, a lack of recipient knowledge that the prior speaker had assumed, and recipient disagreement to account for silences of up to about a second between a first pair part (such as a question) and a second pair part (such as an answer). Davidson (1984) notes that silence after a first pair part can be a result of "puzzlement, or lack of clarity about exactly what's being offered" (p. 127), as well as difficulty in hearing and doubt about the acceptability of the proposal (p. 103). In some forms of institutional talk, long silences may be tolerated, for example in language (and perhaps other) classrooms where a teacher may wait a long time for a student answer to her question (Gardner, 2007). Silences after first pair parts can be precursors to a "potential rejection" (p. 103). As Jefferson (1986) puts it, 'for the vast majority of cases "utterance + pause" does not capture the routine ways that recipients monitor talk in progress. What it does recurrently catch is a particular sort of problem posed for speakers' (p. 179). When these problematic silences occur, she also notes that they tend not to exceed about 1 s in length (Jefferson, 1989). Longer silences are avoided: "Whatever one might mean by "waiting long enough," waiting beyond 1 s is waiting too long" (Jefferson, 1986, p. 179).

There was, however, no indication that most of the silences in the Garrwa conversations were "problematic for the participants" (Jefferson, 1989, p. 170), which is in contrast to most of the longer silences reported in Jefferson's "standard maximum silence" paper. There was little evidence that these kinds of silences were particularly "meaningful." They appeared to be indicators of normal conversation.

Thus, in order to determine whether the talk is truly slowpaced, and unusually long gaps are regularly occurring, possibilities such as problems of various kinds, or orientation to another activity, need to be ruled out. In fact, some of the silences in the conversations studied for this project could be explained by interactional features of these kinds. Many others, however, could not. In the sequences of slow-paced talk we are describing, gaps are the norm, and there is little evidence of anything problematic or unusual in the talk. In fact, even where the slow-paced talk occurs around "problematic" activities, the talk is conducted even more lethargically than similar situations reported in the literature, with regular gaps far exceeding Jefferson's "one second" metric.

### Rules, Gaps, and Lapses

The focal point for this paper is the nature of gaps of silence between turns, and the interesting case is what happens if current speaker does not continue, as this is the point at which gaps between turns emerge (cf. Wilson and Zimmerman, 1986). As Sacks et al. (1974) state, these turn-taking rules have a number of consequences for the conduct of ordinary conversation, including an orientation to the minimization of gaps between turns at talk. For example, if self-selection is used, then the incoming speaker is constrained by the possibility of current speaker continuing under 1c, as well as possible competition from other self-selectors, so an early start—as early as possible in the TRP is necessary to assure speakership. As Moerman (1988) puts it, 'there is some pressure upon a person who wants to speak next to come in a little before . . . a possible end. Moreover, if he doesn't come in now, he may not get to come in next (and) an aspiring speaker who doesn't get to have his say next, might never get to have it' (p. 20). In a similar vein, Fox (2007) notes that 'speakers and recipients in real-time conversation have immense time pressures on them . . . recipients must be ready to start up a turn which is in some way responsive to the current turn, without delay, as

3While Kendrick and Torreira (2014) reported that dispreferred responses occur more commonly than preferred responses after a longer gap of silence, they also found that the most frequently occurring dispreferred and preferred responses occur after gaps of a similar length.

soon as the speaker has come to possible completion of current turn' (p. 314).

As Sacks et al. (1974) say, 'The components and the rule set, in organizing transfer exclusively around transition-relevance places, provide for the possibility of transitions with no gap and no overlap' (p. 708). Notwithstanding this provision, and Moerman's and Fox's observations above, silences can occur, and it is the very optionality of rules 1b and 1c—no speaker is obliged to self-select, nor is a current speaker obliged to continue if no other self-selects—that allows for the possibility of silences that can grow into extended gaps, and ultimately into lapses in the conversation, which is when participants disengage from each other. As Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson put it, 'discontinuities occur when, at some transition-relevance place, a current speaker has stopped, no speaker starts (or continues), and the ensuing space of non-talk constitutes itself as more than a gap—not a gap, but a lapse' (p. 714). Note also that lapses can only occur after a current speaker has chosen not to continue when no other speaker has self-selected. No lapse can properly occur under the "current speaker selects next" provision4 . As the authors point out, in such an event, 'a silence after a turn in which a next has been selected will be heard not as a lapse's possible beginning, nor as a gap, but as a pause before the selected next speaker's turn-beginning' (p. 715). In contrast, if no next speaker is selected, and no other speaker self-selects, and further, current speaker elects not to continue under 1c, then "a series of rounds of possible self-selection by others and self-selection by current to continue—rules 1b and 1c—may develop, in none of which are options to talk exercised, with the thereby constituted development of a lapse in the conversation" (p. 715)5 . The implication of this is that in turn-by-turn talk participants are under considerable pressure to produce their turns early, within the transition space, but there are also provisions in the rules for turns to be delayed, which ultimately can account for lapses in a conversation.

5We are not sure how one can determine that "rounds" of possible self-selection may develop (cf. Wilson and Zimmerman, 1986). An alternative possibility is that once the transition place has passed, and no next speaker has been selected under rule 1a, any speaker can self-select. This is, of course, a matter for empirical investigation, and is beyond the scope of this paper. However, cases such as the following (taken from the first author's data) raise interesting questions.

3 Mel: ◦◦(whoohh hehh)◦◦

4 (8.6)

# Data and Methods

Our corpus consists of five conversations recorded in two remote Aboriginal communities in Australia's Northern Territory, near the Gulf of Carpentaria. Four conversations were recorded in the small town of Borroloola, which has a population of about 1000, the vast majority of whom are Indigenous Australians belonging to four different language groups. These conversations were audio recorded only6 . The fifth conversation was recorded at Robinson River, a Garrwa (Aboriginal) community with a population of about 250 about 2 h drive south of Borroloola. There were five principal participants in these conversations: two elderly Garrwa women in Borroloola (Tina and Ellen7 ), and three elderly Garrwa women in Robinson River (Daphne, Hilda, and Katelin). The Borroloola data were mostly recorded on the veranda of a cabin, the second author and occasional passers-by entered the conversations on a few occasions. The Robinson River data features three elderly Garrwa women who were sitting on the ground on the front porch of the house of one of the women. We call this the "Porch" data. The recording, which lasts for over 2 h in total, was initially set up by the second author to record interactions between fluent Garrwa speakers and children who are not fluent in Garrwa. After about 20 min, the children leave (or are told to leave) by the elderly women, leaving the three of them alone on the porch. It is at this point that the task of recording Garrwa language ceases to be the focus of the talk and the topics turn to matters such as planning future hunting expeditions, complaining, reminiscing, and interacting with other residents as they pass by.

Liz and Mel are at the dinner table. After line 1, a silence ensues, grows, and becomes a lapse, though there is a sigh after six-and-a-half seconds. After no talk for about 16 s, both start to speak simultaneously. Both drop out after one beat of talk, there's a micro-pause, both begin to talk again with identical starts, this time they go on for two beats, and again both drop out. Liz then gets the floor at the third attempt, starting with an apology. The question is what prompted such precision timing in their starts after such a long silence. Preliminary findings by the first author suggest that some body coordination occurs before such post-lapse simultaneous starts. For the arguments of direct relevance to the current paper, such instances would suggest that after a certain length of silence, any speaker may start at any time. Whether that is the case immediately after closure of the transition space, or after a second or so (cf. Jefferson, 1989), or after some other metric remains to be determined. If this turns out to be the case, it would mean that the priority given to selfselection (rule 1b) over current speaker continues (rule 1c) would at some point be superseded.

6We acknowledge the shortcomings of working solely with audio recorded data. The Borroloola recordings were originally made for linguistic analysis, and only later used for conversation analysis. For this reason, we use them only when there are no good illustrations of the points we are making from the video data. Given the relative dearth of Conversation Analytic studies on endangered, non-Western and nonindustrialized language groups, we feel justified in including some audio-only data.

7To preserve anonymity, names of participants have been changed.

4Whilst lapses do not occur after "current speaker selects next" has been applied, it can be the case that gaps open up, and in these gaps it may be that, in the absence of a response by the selected speaker beyond the "normal" transition space (cf. Stivers and Rossano, 2010), another speaker may respond (Stivers and Robinson, 2006). In the cases these authors present, the gaps are mostly less than a second before a non-selected speaker responds. In some other cases, the selected speaker may be engaged in some other activity, contributing to the non-response. A central point the authors make is that there are two competing preferences at work when "current speaker selects next" is applied: one for the speaker so selected to speak, and a second for the action implemented by the current speaker's turn, e.g., a question, to be responded to, e.g., with an answer (if necessary by another speaker if the selected speaker cannot or does not answer). They say in relation to these two competing preferences that "the rule (i.e., 1a) is incrementally relaxed, suggesting an additional order of organization exists past the TRP which is laminated on top of the existing rule" (p. 391).

In all of the conversations much of the talk a mix of Garrwa, a local variety of Kriol (a local creole language) and Aboriginal English, reflecting normal patterns of community multilingualism. A total of about 35 min of the Borroloola conversation, and about 26 min of the Porch conversation have been closely transcribed. In the collection of extracts from these conversations we had over 400 speaker transitions, and within this collection we analyzed more closely about 160 of the longer gaps. Four of the five women acted as informants and teachers of the language as part of the transcription process.

Where we have video evidence, most (but not all) of the long silences do not occur when participants are engaged in nontalk activities, such as those Jefferson (1989) points to explain the extended silences in her data (including examining a train timetable, scanning the surroundings in a neighborhood block party, or writing down an address). On some occasions in our data, something is going on in the environment that might hold the participants' attention, but on others the speakers are sitting around doing nothing apart from talking.

We use Conversation Analysis to analyse the silences within sequences of talk (Sidnell, 2011; Sidnell and Stivers, 2012). These elderly women were among those who taught the second author the grammar of Garrwa, and features of morphology are included in the transcriptions to show turn construction features. The women also provided us with some ethnographic and local contextual information where we needed it to understand what was happening in the interactions, for example about the collection of wild honey ("sugarbag").

We measured the pauses by manually locating them through the inspection of waveforms in Audacity (Audacity Team, 2013), and these figures were then rounded up or down to the nearest tenth of a second. The response offset is measured between the last element of the first turn, and the first element of the responding turn, whether it be a particle such as well or uhm, or a lexical item. In breaths or clicks were also included as part of the second turn.

# Results

In the data we have examined for this paper, we commonly found stretches of talk such as extract 1.

(1) Porch:2.1:866:PD2.

Extract 1 occurred at Robinson River while the three women were sitting quietly alone, mostly without eye contact, though occasionally turning to each other. Two of the women are sitting next to each other, facing the house at an angle. The third is sitting at an angle of about 90◦ to the other two, behind them and facing away from the building, and two (Katelin and Daphne) remained in these positions for the whole of the 2 h of the recording, with Hilda arriving after about 40 min. To obtain eye contact with each other, they needed to turn their heads 30◦ or more. The video for extract 1 shows Katelin fiddling with small unidentified objects in her lap, Daphne with a bottle of drink, and Hilda stroking a coolamon8 . At times such activities lead to what Goodwin (1981, p. 106) has called "activity-occupied withdrawal" from the talk, by which he meant activities such as writing, preparing food, grooming, attending to equipment or other artifacts (Goodwin, 1981, 1994, 1995a). In the Borroloola and Porch conversations such activities mostly did not appear to disrupt the talk, occurring during both talk and silences. Some other activities, however, namely drinking, smoking, coughing and nose blowing, were potential talk inhibitors9 .

Between each turn in this extract (except the last two), there are gaps of silence of between 1.3 and 4.5 s, and there is no evidence, either auditory or visual, that the participants experience any problem with the talk, nor are they engaged in other activities, apart from fiddling with small objects in their hands and, in line 869, during the 2.3 s pause in line 869, Daphne drinking from a bottle.

### Orienting to the Rules of Turn-Taking

So what is happening here to the notion of orientation to TRPs and gap minimization? An initial point is that this has nothing to do with a different set of turn-taking rules. As Sidnell (2001) found for Caribbean Creole conversations, the turn-taking system in the conversations of these Garrwa speakers has the same fundamental organization as that described for American and British conversation. These women routinely speak when selected. They self-select when they are not selected. They sometimes respond with precision timing at TRPs, orienting to possible completion points of TCUs. In extract 2, Tina selects Ellen as next speaker by asking her a question (rule 1a). Ellen responds in "unmarked next position" (i.e., with one beat of silence) when she is asked a question by Tina.

8A coolamon is a vessel made of bark or wood for carrying water, babies etc.

9Other activities in the Robinson River conversation which either were seen to accompany talk, or in our judgment could do so, were: shaking an asthma inhaler, waving away flies, wiping away sweat with a towel, rolling small objects on the lap or thigh, putting objects into a handbag, scratching, brushing hair, and opening or closing a bottle, as well as peering out into the surroundings.

In extract 3, in line 60, Tina selects Ellen as next speaker under rule 1a, by initiating repair with "Who." Ellen latches her response to this repair initiation. It can also be noted, however, that the gap between Ellen's question and Tina's repair initiation is almost twice as long as the average for English conversations (Kendrick, 2015).

```
(3) Garrwa3-10.10.03:V3:58:1′
                               00′′
```
Self-selection under rule 1b can also occur with no gap. In extract 4, Tina announces that she had been dreaming, which does not select Ellen as a next speaker. Ellen then self-selects, on a non-related topic, latching her own remembering to Tina's turn.

There are also cases of turn starts in terminal overlap, that is, early in the transition space. In extract 5, Daphne observes that two people are cooking a kangaroo, and Katelin notes how they are cooking it, overlapping with the last part of Daphne's turn.

Another example of self-selection under rule 1b occurs in extract 6. In this example, in which they are talking to a man who is passing by, both Tina and Ellen self-select in 272 and 273, after 0.2 s, which is the later end of the transition space. Tina is first starter, which, under rule 1b, means she has rights to the floor. Ellen, the second starter, drops out, but then restarts (line 274) immediately Tina finishes her turn, latching her talk to the end of Tina's talk, just as predicted by the Sacks et al. (1974) turn-taking rules.

A further example of self-selection at a point of possible TCU completion occurs in extract 7, which is from the Porch data. Daphne is asking a passing girl to get her mother to bring some fish and chips. Daphne gets two responses to her request, one from the girl, and subsequently one from one of the other older women, Hilda.

At a point when the second of these responses, by Hilda, is possibly complete, after "e bin gawn" (she's gone), Daphne asks a follow-up question, "when."10 However, it turns out that there is more to come in Hilda's turn: "tuh docter" (to the doctor). This is an example of what Jefferson (1984) calls latched overlap, which occurs because Daphne has not predicted the extension of Hilda's turn.

In these conversations we also find examples of the occurrence rule 1c, in which a current speaker continues when no other speaker has self-selected under rule 1b. In extract 8, Katelin requests that the other two women start talking more as she has been doing most of the talking so far (this is for the benefit of the recording of the talk), as she is tired. There is no evidence in the video that she is directing her request at only one of the women through, for example, gaze selection. Katelin comes to a TRP at the end of line 846, with grammatical, intonational and pragmatic completion (cf. Ford and Thompson, 1996). There is no response within 0.4 s, at which point Katelin continues her turn with an account for her tiredness.

10It is possible that Daphne is responding late to the girl's turn in line 1223, but even were this so, the precision timing of Daphne's "when," latched to a point of possible completion, remains.

In extract 9, from one of the Borroloola conversations, we present two examples of rule 1c, in this case both clashing with 1b. This clash occurs because a self-selecting speaker comes in rather late—at the end or even beyond the "normal" transition space—at the same time as a current speaker elects to continue.

In line 98, Tina produces a newsmarker, which appears to be seeking confirmation that it was the young man who did the chasing. In response, Ellen makes reference to his mother11 . After 0.2 s, which would be at the end of the normal transition space for British and American conversation (Wells and Macfarlane, 1998), there is a simultaneous start with Ellen repeating "mudder," and Tina producing a confirming repetition, "im mudder." As these two turns were produced simultaneously, it is now equivocal who, at the simultaneous start that follows in 102-3, is current speaker and who is next: in effect both are current speakers, so both, after a long transition space of 1.6 s, elect to continue, Tina continuing the same sequence with "E mudder deh," and Ellen moving on to something new. However, Ellen drops out, Tina completes her turn, and 0.2 s after Tina finishes, Ellen restarts the turn she had abandoned.

In the final example in this section, extract 10 presents a sequence that can clearly be seen as potentially problematic, in the sense that a question is asked that never gets answered. However, there is no evidence from the talk or from the video that the participants orient to it as particularly problematic, not even Hilda, who asks the question.

```
(10) Porch2.7:545:4′
                      30′′
```
Hilda twice pursues an answer, following the rule 1c according to which if no other speaker self-selects then current speaker may continue. This happens in lines 547 and 549, but after these two attempts, she gives up. Throughout this extract, Hilda is gazing to her right at 40◦ toward Daphne, while the latter is fiddling with the cap on her bottle of soft drink, and the sound of gas escaping is audible. This suggests she may be preoccupied, (as is Katelin—not the addressee—who is brushing her hair). However, fiddling with a bottle cap is not an activity that would necessarily inhibit Daphne from answering Hilda's question. After the first question, Daphne glances at Hilda, but there is no response during a gap of 7 s. There is also evidence that Daphne has heard the second question, because toward the end of line 547, she turns her head toward Hilda, holds her gaze briefly, and then returns it to her drink bottle during the 2.6 s silence that follows. Then there is increment to this question in line 549, "Nuyiburri nanyi" (from the valley) and again nothing for 1.1 s, which is when Daphne does produce a turn, which, however, is not a response to the question, but a complaint about sitting in the sun. It is also notable that Hilda does nothing to show that she finds the lack of an answer to her question problematic, apart from twice pursuing the answer before dropping it.

These examples demonstrate that these Garrwa women can, and regularly do (though as extract 10 shows, not invariably), orient to projectably complete units of talk, the turn-taking rules, and transition places, as explicated in Sacks et al. (1974). What, then, is going on when there are regular long silences between turns in these conversations?

11It is unclear to us who the "mother" is who is being referred to here, and why she is being referred to. It is a common practice in Aboriginal communities for reference to persons to be indirect or vague (Blythe, 2009; Garde, 2003). This phenomenon can be explained, at least in part, because they live in small communities in which everyone knows everyone else, but also because there are kinship related taboos on naming certain persons directly. Be that as it may, following Tina's repair initiating "Yindi" in line 98, there is a sequence in which the reference appears to be resolved to the satisfaction of Tina. The point we are making in this extract about turn-taking practices following Sacks et al. (1974) rules holds despite the reference to "mother" remaining unclear.

# Accounting for Long Silences and Expanded Transition Spaces

We have reported so far that in our data longer gaps between turns are common. There are, however, striking differences in the length of silences between the "current-speaker-selects-next" (1a) and "next-speaker-self-selects" (1b) techniques. This may not be surprising, but this is another feature that shows that Garrwa speakers are conducting their conversation in a similar way to English conversationalists. When a current speaker selects a next, the response tends to come relatively quickly, though with a longer delay than has been observed in other languages. In all of the examples examined from our Garrwa corpus, silences after speaker selection occur regularly up to 1.5 s (Mushin and Gardner, 2009). In contrast, when no next speaker has been selected, the gaps can be much longer. In this section, we examine some extracts in which current speaker selects next, and following that, we consider some cases in which no next speaker has been selected.

### Silences After Selection of Next Speaker

As was noted above, silences occurring when a current speaker selects the next are of a very different order to silences when the next speaker self-selects. According to Sacks et al. (1974), if a current speaker has selected the next speaker, there is an obligation for the selected participant to speak as early as possible at the next transition space. If no next speaker has been selected, then no such obligation exists.

On some occasions the TRP may be "expanded," for example because of activity-occupied withdrawal, or a dispreferred response. However, on many occasions in the Garrwa conversations, when a current speaker has selected a next under rule 1a, there is a gap preceding even a preferred response. Regularly, but not always, these silences are "filled" with relevant gestures, such as head nods which precede the talk, and there is thus no delay in the response in such cases. On others, there is no talk-supporting activity. There is a delay of 1.4 s in extract 11 between the question and answer.

```
(11) Porch:2.1:1002:IR-4:1′
                             35′′
```
This is a case in which there is no gestural support of the talk. Katelin and Hilda are both looking at Daphne whilst she is asking the question. During the question and the 1.4 s silence, Katelin and Daphne have eye contact, though Katelin is fiddling with her collar, which is not an activity that necessarily precludes simultaneous talk. There is nothing in this sequence that indicates any trouble, nor does Katelin appear to have her attention on any other matter. The answer, when it comes, is preferred, though it is expanded (and it is expanded further beyond this short sequence)12. This contrasts with a typical preferred response in "Western" talk, where such a response tends to come quickly and briefly, without accounts or other expansions (Schegloff, 2007: 67ff).

The broader context of this adjacency pair is that it occurs during a reminiscing sequence about how in the old days they used to collect waterlilies to eat. This may help explain another feature of this sequence, namely that this is on the face of it an information-seeking question, which in English mostly attracts a brief, phrasal response (Fox and Thompson, 2010), but here we have an extended response—which is further extended beyond this adjacency pair (not shown), so this WH-question could be seen as a prompt for extending the reminiscing. Planning for an extended response may be a factor in the delay of 1.4 s.

Extract 12 is from the Borroloola corpus. There is no video to support the analysis, but this is included as an example of another delayed answer with a preferred response, with no perceptible trouble.

In extract 13, the silence cannot be accounted for even in part by non-talk activities or delays associated with a dispreferred response. Hilda repeats an answer that she had already provided once, namely that wild honey can be found at Hubblestrap. Daphne and Hilda have eye contact, with Daphne's neck "torqued" almost 90◦ toward Hilda (Schegloff, 1998). They are clearly focused on talking to each other.

```
(13) Porch2.10:1282:2′
                         00′′:IR-5:2′
                                     13′′
```
12The vagueness of "they used to" in response to a "who" question in line 1006 reflects a common practice in Indigenous Australian talk of vague person reference (eg., Garde, 2003; Blythe, 2013). This may in part have to do with the small, close-knit communities in which everyone knows everyone else. It may also have to do with taboos, where naming of certain kin is forbidden (Blythe, 2013). This issue is beyond the scope of this paper.

Between the answer that Hilda had given in 1225 in extract seven and this sequence, the three women had been talking to two boys who had arrived where they were sitting. Daphne then turns her head sharply toward Hilda in 1279 with a summons (the "Mum" in 1279 is a term of address directed at Hilda), which has the effect of Hilda repeating her answer, that the sugarbag is at Hubblestrap, and Daphne then asks for more specific information with "yangkawa" (whereabouts). There is a delay of 1.7 s between the repair initiation in 1286 and the response in 1288. What happens in this silence is fully oriented to the answer. Hilda turns her head slowly in a westerly direction (away from Daphne), and this takes up the whole 1.7 s, and then nods in that direction as she says "Righd where dem grid." There is no hurry to start talking. The head turn prepares for the answer, and is accomplished prior to the verbal response. This languid response contrasts with the general practice in English (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987) and Japanese (Kita and Ide, 2007) conversation, where it is most usual for the gesture and talk to occur very quickly after the prior turn, with the gesture slightly foreshadowing the words (Streek, 1993).

In the next extract Daphne urges the other two to hurry up so they can leave. Her directive in line 894 receives no immediate compliance from the other two. Indeed, first Hilda and then Katelin concur, but with substantial gaps of 1.2 and 2.4 s, respectively.

```
(14) Porch:2.8:894:4′
                       40′′:IR-3:4′
                                    12′′
```
This is an agreeing sequence, that is, each turn is a preferred next: both recipients say they want to go to eat something, but neither shows any sign of complying with Daphne's directive by getting ready to leave. There is no observable ambient or interactional reason visible in the video for the delays between these turns. However, rather than the immediate or even early responses to preferreds that are reported in the literature (Levinson, 1983; Pomerantz, 1984a; Schegloff, 2007), there are substantial delays here. Daphne is waving away flies and then she picks up a small object and shakes it: but she does this after she has spoken. Hilda is stroking a coolamon throughout this sequence, but this is not an activity that interferes with the ability to talk. Daphne is urging them to quick action, so what better illustration of the slower pace of the talk could there be than this languorous hurrying up?

We can see from the examples presented in this section that sometimes when the current speaker selects next, the response occurs relatively promptly, mostly within about a second-and-a-half (see Mushin and Gardner, 2009 for a more detailed discussion), whilst others (not presented) have delays of less than a second. The metric with a maximum of about a second-and-a-half is similar to what Scollon and Scollon (1981, p. 25) claimed for Athabaskan. This metric is about half a second longer than Jefferson (1989) found for the American, British, and Dutch conversations she studied, where there was a "standard maximum silence" of about 1 s (0.9–1.2) for various kinds of silence. The longer silences she found could be accounted for by activities the participants were engaged in that interfered with the flow of the conversations. For these Garrwa conversations, there may be grounds for amending Jefferson's observation about waiting for 1 s to: "Whatever one might meant by "waiting long enough," waiting beyond one-and-a-half seconds after one has been selected is waiting too long" [adapted from Jefferson (1986), p. 179]. In the next section, we shall discuss gaps of silence between turns where there is no selection of next speaker by the current speaker.

### Silences Before Self-Selection by Next Speaker

The metric of a maximum silence of one and a half seconds appears to apply only to turn transitions in which next speaker has been selected by current speaker, but not to self-selection in turn-by-turn talk. This can be partly explained by the fact that where there has been no selection of next speaker, there is no obligation for anyone to speak. A gap may ensue, and can extend until there is a lapse in the conversation and speakers disengage. In many cases in the Garrwa conversations, however, inter-turn silences of several seconds occur without any apparent orientation to a problem in the talk, nor any indication from changes in body posture that the conversation has lapsed. Some of these gaps can be explained in the same way as those discussed earlier: sometimes non-talk activities, or dispreferreds, or the ends of sequences and topic attrition occur in conjunction with longer silences. On other occasions, however, such factors do not appear to elucidate the silences.

In extract 15, which is from the beginning of the Porch conversation, there is very little non-talk activity from the three women: Katelin scratches her foot, and Daphne appears to wave away a fly, but otherwise they are sitting and looking mostly straight ahead, without eye contact. They do not appear to pay much attention to the barking dog, except for Hilda's question about it in line 8.

13A humpy is a small temporary shelter.

In the above extract, there is no topic that they are pursuing. They've been sitting around for a long time before this point in the conversation. There is no strong engagement. They move in desultory fashion from topic to topic, commenting on what is going on around them—a dog barking, a group of people approaching. Reference by Katelin to a "humpy" (temporary shelter) is followed by 5.2 s of silence. The talk in lines 3–4 is followed by a silence of 4.3 s. Daphne then self-selects with an observation that something is round the back. 1.6 s later, Hilda asks a question which does not get answered. 1.7 s after this, Katelin then observes and comments on some people approaching. Half a second later Hilda mentions the presence of a pig nearby.

In contrast to extract 15, where there is little topical continuity between the turns, in the next extract, the gaps—even the 7.6 s in line 115—are all between turns that are coherent self-selecting contributions in the flow of the talk.

```
(16) Garrwa2-9.10.03-V2:111: 1′
                                 45′′
```
In the first part of this extract, all of the talk is by Tina, with no hearable responses from Ellen, although there appears to be no reason why Ellen could not have self-selected. This is not a storytelling, although Tina's first turns refer to a recent event in the town. They have been exchanging views about people. None of these turns selects a next speaker, there is no competition for the floor, no sense of having to get the next turn in "now and not later," and neither participant shows any urgency in producing a next turn. Two of the silences could be analyzed as intraturn silences, namely the ones in line in line 113 and 119, each of which is an increment to Tina's prior talk. But even so, the prior talk in each case ends at a possible TRP, and thus speaker change is relevant. For the talk that comes after the 7.2 s silence in line 115, however, it is harder to analyse this as an intraturn silence, as what precedes it is potentially complete, and what follows is not an increment. The talk flows topically, and could have been produced as a coherent multi-unit turn without any silences. Furthermore, there is no aural evidence of any other activity during this silence.

In this section we have looked at inter-turn gaps that occur when no next speaker has been selected. We have found that there are numerous gaps in these positions, and some of them are very long. The extracts presented here are ordinary conversation, and some of the languor of the talk here can be explained by non-talk activity or dispreferred actions. However, most of these non-talk activities are grooming or fiddling with objects, activities that could accompany talk, in contrast for example, to reading or writing, which require more focused attention. In very many sequences in these conversations, the inescapable observation is that this talk is inherently languorous, and there is no attempt at minimization of gaps in the way that has been described for English conversation, for example in Sacks et al. (1974). Very long silences, or lapses, are not frequent, as we have only three silences of longer than 10 s in our corpus14. Furthermore, gaps of more than 2 or 3 s are not common. We do find overwhelming evidence of an orientation by these speakers to the rules of turn-taking as presented in Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson. The difference from most published literature on turn-taking is one of the "value of variables" (Schegloff, 2007, p. 74). It is a difference to one of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's gross observations: "transitions (from one turn to the next) with no gap and no overlap are common. Together with transitions characterized by slight gap or slight overlap, they make up the vast majority of transitions" (pp. 700–701). In many sections of these conversations, the majority of transitions are, in contrast, characterized by substantial gaps.

# Extended Gaps in Conversation in Other Contexts

An easy explanation of the phenomenon we are reporting in this paper would be one of cultural difference: that Aboriginal Australians have a different "conversational style." Whilst we have found regular lack of gap minimization in these conversations, there is no evidence in the data of a different set of turn-taking

14Unfortunately these are all in the Borroloola audio-only data, so they cannot be checked for what the participants were doing during the silences.

rules for these speakers. As Sidnell (2001) noted in his study on Caribbean Creole conversations, "[t]here is, at time of writing, no empirical study which provides evidence that humans do conversation in a fundamentally different way" (1286). We provide no evidence for this either. Our study provides another example of a non-Western culture in which the fundamental organization of conversation appears to be "grounded in a speciesspecific adaptation to the contingencies of human social intercourse" (Sidnell, 2001, p. 1263). The difference is only that regularly there is a marked expansion of what counts, at least in Western conversation, as a normal transition place.

In fact, the slow pace of these conversations is not, on the evidence we have, culture–specific. We have some evidence that expanded transition spaces occur in "western" talk. In the data used by the first author for his work on response tokens (Gardner, 2001), there are examples of slow-paced conversations amongst Anglo-Australian couples who recorded themselves when they were at home alone. These are intimates, engaged in talk at times of day when the pressure is off, such as after the evening meal. There are times in these conversations that look and sound very similar to the Garrwa conversations. In extract 18, there are some very long gaps, including one of 4.3 s in line 163 following a question from Liz, that is, after she has selected Mel as next speaker.

```
(18) L&MC2ai-Languorous:144
```
In the early part of this extract, Mel appears to be reading the television schedule for the evening in a newspaper, an example of "activity-occupied withdrawal," with interspersed comments on programs. In the latter part, though, there are questions and answers, and the slow pace continues. The rustling newspaper in 164 might suggest that Mel is still engaged in reading—which would be an explanation for the long gap—but still, overall, the pace here is slow, and there is little attempt to minimize gaps.

In extract 19, Ike and Jan are driving, and are discussing who is going to have the car later.

### (19) I&JW4a

This conversation was recorded during a quite lengthy car journey. It begins with a proposal by Ike that he go into work in the evening, which gets a less than enthusiastic response from Jan. What follows is a series of proposals and counter-proposals and accompanying accounts. What is notable and relevant to this paper are the silences between turns in this sequence of up to 4 s.

The extended interturn silences of these Anglo-Australian conversations provide evidence that slow-paced talk is not restricted to cultures or societies such as the Garrwa people, or the Native American Warm Springs indigenous people that Philips (1983) reported on. We certainly have not found in these materials, as Philips (1976) claimed for the Warm Spring Indians, that turn-taking by their system was self-directed, or that anyone who wanted to speak did so and for as long as they wanted (Philips did not provide closely transcribed materials to back up her claim.). There are further situations in which talk characterized by expanded transition spaces is normal: second language classroom talk (from the first author's data), second language conversations (Wong, 2000), and perhaps most extremely in hypnosis sessions (Demosthenous, 2008). In the last of these, gaps of more than 10 s regularly occur between a hypnotist's question and a client's answer whilst in deep hypnosis.

What may be happening in these Garrwa conversations (and in the other interactions for which expanded transition spaces have been reported) is that a lack of gap minimization occurs with a greater frequency than has generally been reported in the Conversation Analysis literature. These interactions differ from those that have provided the data for many Conversation Analysis studies, in which the speakers are at dinner parties, are on the phone, are in animated groups engaged in lively discussion.

# Discussion

In the Stivers et al. (2009) study of turn-taking practices across 10 languages, key findings were that there is a general avoidance of simultaneous talk and a minimization of gaps between turns. However, they did find a variation in the length of average gaps of 0.25 s across these languages, leading them to conclude that the fundamental turn taking mechanisms are universal, with differences between languages being only quantitative. While the methods used for our study and its primary focus are different from theirs, and thus preclude any direct comparison, our findings do broadly support those of Stivers et al. Using the same corpus as for the current study, Mushin and Gardner (2009) noted that approximately 50% of silences in the Garrwa conversations were over 0.9 s, and Gardner (2010), also working with the same corpus, but focusing only on question-answer turns (N = 62), found the average gap between question and answer to be 0.75 s, about half as long again as the longest average silences found in a similar environment for any language in the Stivers et al. study15. These findings provide further support for the claim that there is some cultural variation in the timing of responses and of next turns generally, but some caution needs to be expressed in making this claim.

In his responses to Stivers and Rossano (2010), on why there may be delays longer than predicted by Sacks et al. (1974), or even no response at all, Schegloff (2010) makes the point that participants in these conversations may be in "continuing states of incipient talk" (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973). Couper-Kuhlen (2010) makes a similar point, reminding us of Goffman's distinction between "focused" and "non-focused" gatherings, with the latter displaying a lack of "tightly organized exchange of doings," and thus perhaps less urgency to produce second pairs parts or, one might add, less urgency to avoid extended silences between turns. Such situations might include "members of a household in their living rooms, employees who share an office, passengers together in an automobile" (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973, pp. 324–325), or, one might further add, old ladies sitting for hours on the porch of a house in the heat of the day. Indeed, the examples from white Australian couples' conversation, where at times similarly long gaps between turns to those in the Garrwa conversations were found, provide some support for Schegloff's and Couper-Kuhlen's observations. In reference to some of the long silences in her data, Jefferson (1989) muses that there may be a "'relaxation" of certain "rules" among intimates' (p. 192). She is referring here specifically to a speaker completing another speaker's turn, where that other speaker is a spouse or sibling. Something similar may be going on in these Garrwa conversations, namely a relaxation of rules amongst intimates where gaps are not minimized. The women in our data grew up together, so are more like family than close friends (in fact, Hilda and Daphne are sisters-in-law); they have lived in small communities in close proximity to each other for many years. Long silences between turns—gaps that do not transform into lapses—are not only tolerated, but are common. In addition, these women have little to do. They sit around for hours at a time, passing the time of day in conversation. Conversations involving intimates in familiar surroundings, with a lack of pressure to talk may in fact be at least as pertinent as cultural difference in accounting for expanded transition spaces.

More specific and local reasons for delays in responding, as some of the examples in the current study suggest, may be "disengagement or lack of attention" (Levinson, 2010), the "activityoccupied withdrawal" that Goodwin (1981) notes, such as brushing one's hair, or seeking something in a handbag. Our analyses also point to the possibility that there is less urgency to respond if a next speaker has not been selected than if they have. Further, but generally less amenable to verification, if a next speaker lacks the knowledge to respond, it is likely that a response may be delayed, or a non-complying response may transpire, or there may be no response at all. Such local factors may then be in play with the wider overall structure of the encounters noted above, and when these local conditions occur during a "non-focused gathering," the frequency of longer gaps between turns may increase.

We do not feel confident to claim that these longer gaps can be explained by culture or ethnicity, even if there is growing evidence that there may be a greater tolerance (or at least occurrence) of longer gaps in some cultures or language groups than others. If gaps are indeed more frequent in some cultures than others, such as Garrwa (and other Indigenous Australian languages) or 6=Akhoe Hai||om ( ¯ Hoymann, 2010), spoken in Namibia, it may be that the more traditional life style in very remote areas with relatively little contact to the modern, industrial world does not fully explain the slower pace of conversation, but rather that in such traditional or semi-traditional societies or communities, the people are more likely to live their lives at a slower tempo, in more "non-focused gatherings," and less "tightly organized exchanges of doings." In the conversations we have examined, the old women sit around for hours. They have few appointments to meet, nowhere much to go, little pressure to do anything. They are in familiar surroundings, where they live in close proximity to and know everyone else, as in an extended family. But also they are sitting outside, where people are passing, there are things to watch and notice. Much of the time they are loosely engaged with each other. Life's pace is slow. Conversation is slow. Nevertheless, when the occasion demands, they are perfectly capable of fast-paced conversation, and can provide responses with no gap and no overlap.

As Schegloff (2000) has noted,

nothing special rests on the "one-at-a-time" proposal. Should a compelling demonstration of a different way of organizing participation in conversation be provided, it would allow us to seek a more general account that could subsume both one-at-a-time and its alternative(s) as special cases (p. 47).

The materials presented here in many ways suggest no more than was already accounted for in Sacks et al. (1974) under rule 1c, and some subsequent notes on this rule on how discontinuous talk emerges. If no speaker selects next speaker, no potential next

15Gardner (2010) also found that 45% of questions were never answered, which is higher than any of the ten languages investigated by Stivers et al. (2009), which was Korean at 36%.

speaker self-selects, and current speaker chooses not to continue, then a gap develops. Such gaps may occur more or less regularly, and develop into shorter or longer gaps, and extend further or less far toward lapses. In some conversations, with some participants, in some low-pressure situations, and perhaps even in some cultures, it may be the case that the option not to continue under 1c is exercised more regularly, and that once the transition space has passed, the floor opens up to anyone to self-select as next speaker. This could even be posited as a "lowest order rule" of turn-taking: if current speaker chooses not to continue speaking under rule 1c, then after closure of the regular transition space, any speaker may self-select at any time, first speaker to self-select gaining rights to speak. Where the option not to continue speaking is regularly exercised, then the gross observation for "one-ata-time" will not hold as a recurrent feature of such talk in such circumstances.

There is one final point to be made. We have found that these Garrwa speakers are quite capable of distributing their conversational turns in just the way that Sacks et al. (1974) described, with next speaker selection, self-selection if a next speaker hasn't been selected, and continuation by the current speaker if no other speaker has self selected. The turns in these Garrwa conversations are constructed in units that are identifiable as TCUs, and there is orientation to TRPs, albeit often extended ones. Apart from Sidnell's (2001) study of Caribbean Creole English and Tanaka's (2000) study of Japanese, there have been few studies about the rules of turn-taking of languages other than English, particularly of languages (and cultures) very different from English such as Garrwa, that have shown that the fundamental rules of turntaking are followed as Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson describe. Yet it is through studies such as these that we are able to enrich our understanding of what is fundamental about human social interaction.

# Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Garrwa people who contributed to this project, both in allowing us to record them, and in working with us on the transcriptions. Funding support for this project came from Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies grant GO5/7053 Garrwa language project and the University of Queensland. Ethical clearance for the collection of audio and video recordings was given by the University of Queensland Behavioral and Social Sciences Ethical Review Committee<PHONE_NUMBER> Garrwa Language Project).

# References

Gardner, R. (2007). "Broken starts: bricolage in turn starts in second language talk," in Language Learning Teaching as Social Interaction, eds Z. Hua, P. Seedhouse, L. Wei, and V. Cook (London: Palgrave), 58–71.

Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on 'latency' in overlap onset. Hum. Stud. 9, 153–183.

Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2015 Gardner and Mushin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# **Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking**

## *Melisa Stevanovic\* and Anssi Peräkylä*

*Finnish Centre of Excellence in Intersubjectivity in Interaction, Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland*

In this perspective article, we consider the relationship between experience sharing and turn-taking. There is much evidence suggesting that human social interaction is permeated by two temporal organizations: (1) the sequential framework of turn-taking and (2) the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity. From this perspective, we introduce two alternative hypotheses about how the relationship between experience sharing and turn-taking could be viewed. According to the first hypothesis, the home environment of experience sharing is in the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity, while the motivation to share experiences is in tension with the sequential framework of turn-taking. According to the second hypothesis, people's inclination to coordinate their actions in terms of turn-taking is motivated precisely by their propensity to share experiences. We consider theoretical and empirical ideas in favor of both of these hypotheses and discuss their implications for future research.

### *Edited by:*

*Kobin H. Kendrick, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands*

### *Reviewed by:*

*Beatrice S. Reed, University of York, UK Alexa Hepburn, Loughborough University, UK*

### *\*Correspondence:*

*Melisa Stevanovic, Finnish Centre of Excellence in Intersubjectivity in Interaction, Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, P.O.Box 4, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

> *Received: 19 November 2014 Accepted: 30 March 2015 Published: 14 April 2015*

### *Citation:*

*Stevanovic M and Peräkylä A (2015) Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking. Front. Psychol. 6:450. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00450* **Keywords: turn-taking, emotion, experience sharing, emotional contagion, conversation analysis**

# **Sequentiality and Concurrency in Human Social Interaction**

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of conversation analytic studies explicating the social organization of, and the highly ordered interactional tasks performed by, emotional expressions in social interaction (e.g., Peräkylä and Sorjonen, 2012). This perspective paper seeks to further this line of research by considering how expressions in the service of what we call experience sharing are embedded in the most primordial temporal organizations of interaction.

Many naturally occurring interactions call for individuals to coordinate their actions in terms of turn-taking. This happens especially in the context of language use: the principle of one participant talking at a time (Sacks et al., 1974) allows humans to communicate complex thoughts and intentions. In conversation, social actions (e.g., proposals, offers, and invitations) and their responses (e.g., acceptances and rejections) are organized in terms of successive turns at talk. As pointed out by Schegloff (1988, pp. 98–99), turn-taking enables humans to pursue stable trajectories of action and responsive action. This arrangement will be referred to as the *sequential framework of turntaking*. It denotes not only the temporal but also the conditional relationship between participants' interactional moves.

In addition to the sequential framework of turn-taking, human interactive conduct is permeated by another temporo-conditional arrangement—something that we call the *concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity*. The literature on "emotional contagion" suggests that humans have an automatic tendency to mimick other people's non-verbal emotional expressions, which affects the emotional experience of the mimicking person (Hatfield et al., 1993, 1994; Dimberg, 2007). This happens as a result of afferent feedback generated by elementary motor mimicry, which produces a simultaneous emotional match independently of people's cognitive abilities to understand what is going on in the mind of the other (Carr et al., 2003; Leslie et al., 2004; Barresi and Moore, 2008; Decety and Meyer, 2008). From this perspective, two participants' interactional moves are, by definition, connected by a causal relationship (one participant produces an expression first and the other acts in response to him/her), but the actions/expressions take place in a shared time. Overlap of expressions is regular. Regarding the opportunity for expression, the participants are positioned symmetrically, which is reflected in the frequent concurrency of the participants' interactional moves.

There are different motives that lead humans to interact with each other. In addition to their instrumental communicative goals, humans are also motivated to share experiences about events and things in the environment with their significant others and to become "swept along" by them (Feinman, 1982; Striano and Rochat, 1999; Tomasello, 1999; Hobson and Hobson, 2008; Rochat et al., 2009). This motivation has even been regarded as the force that has driven the evolution of language (Locke, 1996, 2002; Dunbar, 1997). But how does experience sharing relate to the sequential framework of turn-taking, where language use regularly takes place? Could it be that experience sharing is "at home" in the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity, while being in tension with turn-taking? Or, do humans cast their experience sharing into the system of turn-taking precisely because it supports experience sharing? In what is to come, we will discuss these two alternative hypotheses one after another, with the aim of paving the way for future empirical research on the topic.

# **Hypothesis I: Experience Sharing is in Tension with the Sequential Framework of Turn-Taking**

Our first hypothesis suggests that the home environment of experience sharing is in the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity, while there is a tension between experience sharing and the sequential framework of turn-taking.

The first pieces of support for this hypothesis come from the developmental psychological research literature, which suggests there to be automatic resonance processes that allow humans, right from the outset, to bridge their own and others' experiences. With reference to neonatal imitation, Meltzoff and Brooks (2001) have argued that, in reproducing the behavior of others, infants automatically perceive others as "like me" and thus begin to develop a sense of social connectedness, mutual recognition, and shared experience. In other words, experience sharing has been suggested to emerge "in the guise of emotional contagion" (Brinck, 2008).

Another type of support for our first hypothesis comes from adult interaction, and is provided by the temporal organization of the instances of language use associated with experience sharing. While language use may be anchored in the organization of turntaking (see e.g., Schegloff, 1996, 2006), still, there is much work suggesting that the moments of experience sharing may be exceptional in this respect (Coates, 1994; Lerner, 2002; Pillet-Shore, 2012; Vatanen, 2014). In conversation analysis, a classic example is provided by Goodwin and Goodwin (1987), who described the sharing of affective stances in the form of concurrent agreeing assessments. Their example involves two conversationalists praising something a mutual friend has baked. One of them says: "Jeff made an asparagus pie, it was so good." In overlap with the first speaker's "so," the co-interactant launches an assessment: "I love it." Hence, it appears that, in the moments of experience sharing, the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity colonizes the organization of spoken interaction, leading to the momentary relaxation of turn-taking rules. Also studies within the domain of mother-infant interaction have shown that positive affective expressions tend to coincide with simultaneous vocalizations (Stern et al., 1975; Beebe et al., 1979).

Besides overlapping talk, there are also other ways in which experience sharing, as it were, "surpasses" turn-taking. Face is central here. Speakers may use their facial displays to mark a transition from affectively neutral talk to emotional experience sharing in the middle of their ongoing turns at talk (cf. Iwasaki, 2011). Likewise, a recipient may display an emotional stance toward an actional or a topical element in a speaker's ongoing turn at talk, thereby inviting the speaker to redirect her utterance production (Kaukomaa et al., in press). Detailed considerations of parallel uses of words and facial displays in moments of experience sharing are thus particularly intriguing.

From this perspective, let us consider Example 1 (taken from Peräkylä and Ruusuvuori, 2006), where one participant's telling (about a dress code that a mutual friend working in a newspaper needed to conform to) is followed by a shared amusement of both of the participants. Here, the onset and the completion of the smiles take place with one party doing the first move and the other party following. However, between these sequentially organized boundary moves, the participants maintain simultaneous smiles, embodying the sharing of experiences over a lengthy period of time.

During the most part of the first speaker's (B's) telling (lines 1–6) both participants are looking down with straight faces (Frame 1). At the end of the telling, however, they establish mutual gaze and the teller (B) adopts a smiling face (Frame 2). After a gap (line 7), the recipient (A) reciprocates the smile and raises her brows (Frame 3), simultaneously producing an animated verbal response of "ritualized disbelief " (Heritage, 1984, p. 339; line 8). While the interaction has thus far abided to the sequential framework of turn-taking, now, as soon as the mutual smile has been established, the participants' facial conduct gets detached from the sequential organization of turn-taking as the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity breaks through. During a moment of "heightened emotive involvement" (Selting, 1994), they maintain their smiles and mutual gaze over a number of turns conveying ostensibly different actions (assessment, line 10; joking advice, line 11; Frame 4). The temporality of the mutual smile goes beyond the turn-taking organization. After this, the participants, however, break their mutual gaze (Frame 5), which is followed by their smiles becoming less intensive. One participant (A) adopts a straight face at the onset of her question (lines 13–14), while the other (B) does the same during her answer to the question (line 15; Frame 6). Thereby, they indicate that the heightened moment of experience sharing is over. While the primary modality of expression surpassing the

turn-taking rules in Example 1 was facial expression, and the organization of talk followed turn-taking rules, the overlapping talk (lines 10–11) during the experience sharing should also be acknowledged.

The idea of experience sharing being in tension with the sequential temporality of turn-taking reverberates with certain recent suggestions presented in the conversation analytic literature: Heritage (2011) has described the epistemic dilemmas associated with the "empathic moments in interaction" and Enfield (2011) has suggested that it is turn-taking with its inherent asymmetries that helps to account for the existence of such dilemmas. But even if experience sharing would be in tension with turn-taking, this seems not to be the case for instrumental communication. In her study on university subcommittee meetings, Edelsky (1981) observed that those participants who otherwise made frequent use of overlapping talk still abided to the canonical turn-taking system when their talk was oriented toward the official business of the meeting. The same phenomenon seems to apply also for those emotional expressions that are used to carry out different kinds of instrumental communicative tasks. For example, Heath (1989) showed that, when patients in medical consultations tried to legitimize medical attention to their ailment through cries of pain, these expressions of suffering abided to the organization of turn-taking.

The points detailed above suggest that the home environment for experience sharing might be in the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity, while experience sharing (unlike instrumental communicative goals) may call for the participants to depart from the sequential framework of turn-taking.

# **Hypothesis II: The Sequential Framework of Turn-Taking Serves Experience Sharing**

While our first hypothesis questions the relevance of turn-taking for experience sharing, our second hypothesis represents just the opposite view: it suggests that the sequential framework of turntaking is *not* in tension with experience sharing but, instead, serves it.

Previously, we highlighted the significance of the automatic resonance processes for experience sharing. However, it has been pointed out that the mere reproduction of other people's behaviors represents a closed loop system: it reflects what is already out there (Rochat and Passos-Ferreira, 2008). So, for people really to relate and share each other's experiences more fully, these automatic resonance processes need to be embedded in an open system of *contingent* emotional reciprocity. It can thus be argued that contingent emotional reciprocity, and thus also experience sharing, can be facilitated by the sequential framework of turn-taking.

In human ontogeny, the first instantiations of contingent emotional reciprocity appear in the context of alternation between approach and withdrawal tendencies (Beebe and Stern, 1977; Hietanen et al., 2008). Infants have been shown occasionally visually to disengage from their interactive partners and then return to the engagement. Often, this happens in a highly coordinated fashion—that is, when one partner moves from a less engaged phase to a more engaged phase, or vice versa, the other partner responds with a corresponding change in the same direction. Still, these changes are likely to take place within certain timelags (Cohn and Tronick, 1987). This gives the interaction a sense of one person making a bid of engagement and another person responding to that bid in a positive way.

In the subsequent development of the human infant, the experiences of contingent emotional reciprocity get more nuanced. Already from 2 months on, infants and their caretakers start to look and listen to each other more carefully; producing vocal, facial and gestural responses elicited by the expressed feelings and interests of their interaction partners (Spitz and Wolf, 1946; Trevarthen, 1979; Stern, 1985; Cohn and Elmore, 1988; Rochat and Passos-Ferreira, 2008). During these monitoring processes, the infants gradually develop expectations for how the interaction is likely to proceed; for example, they learn to expect that, following an emotional bid on their part, be it via a smile, gaze, or frown, the other will respond in return (Sagi and Hoffman, 1976; Meltzoff and Moore, 1977; Wolff, 1987; Sroufe, 1996; Rochat, 2001). Compared to the automatic resonance processes, the reliance on social expectations is risky but, when successful, likely to result in a powerful experience of shared emotion (Rochat et al., 2009).

From this perspective, let us consider Example 2, where an 11-month-old girl, Nea, prompts a prominent instance of experience sharing. First, she looks at her parents, assuring their attention. Thereafter, she puts a funny grimace on her face, thus prompting her parents' to laugh heartfeltly. Finally, she joins in the laughter, expressing a high level of positive arousal. The sharing of experience is organized in successive turns. This turntaking organization of sharing builds on the child's capacity to anticipate her significant others' reactions to her behavior, while there is a genuine possibility that the parents will not behave as expected.

Example 2 demonstrates how a turn-taking structure, where expressions are organized as distinct temporal units that follow each other, provides for experiences of contingent emotional reciprocity. By making a grimace, Nea, took on trust that her parents would recognize what she was up to; in their "next turn" (laughter), the parents displayed that they indeed did; and, the correctness of the parents' interpretation was confimed by Nea, through her final laughter. Here, turn-taking enables the participants to establish meaningful linkages between their behaviors. While each behavior occupies a forward-looking status, raising expectations for what is to happen next (on conditional relevance,

see Schegloff, 2007, p. 20), each response to such behaviors occupies a backward-looking status as something that was invoked by what just occurred (on the next-turn proof procedure, see Sacks et al., 1974, pp. 728–729). It is thus the dynamic interplay between expectations and their overflowing satisfaction that provides a scaffolding for a possible escalation of emotion displays (each participant endorsing the affective aspect of their co-participants' turns), which may generate particularly intensive instances of experience sharing. Also the conversation analytic research on emotional expression provides support for our second hypothesis. This line of research has shown that the participants may refrain from the immediate reciprocation of contagious emotional expressions, such as laughter and crying (Hepburn and Potter, 2012; Shaw et al., 2013). Instead, these expressions seem to be regulated by the turn-by-turn sequential organization of interaction. For example, the recipients of complaint stories (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012) and news deliveries (Maynard and Freese, 2012) have been shown to produce their emotional responses at the completion of the news delivery or narrative, rather than immediately after the tellers' emotional displays. Likewise, surprise tokens such as *wow*, *gosh*, *oh my good*, *ooh*, *phew* have been described as interactionally organized performances, interactional achievements, instead of automatic emotional eruptions (Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2006; see also Heath et al., 2012). It could be precisely the sensitivity of emotional expression to the sequential framework of turn-taking that enables the participants to display their willingness to grasp—as fully as possible—the particular experience that their co-participants are about to share.

Finally, we may turn the table around and ask whether experience sharing can also serve turn-taking. This possibility appears relevant with reference to the Goffmanian idea of the ubiquitous insecurity of people in social interaction—a theme that runs all through his work (see e.g., Goffman, 1955; Rawls, 1987). In social interaction, by every turn that a person takes, s/he claims being worthy of other's attention and calls for others to recognize this claim (Goffman, 1955, pp. 9–10), while there is always a possibility that this claim will *not* be recognized by others (Stevanovic, 2015; Peräkylä, in press). The emotionally secure framework of experience sharing with significant others, however, provides an embarrassment-free site for the practicing of making such claims and for the acquisition of the more asymmetric responsibilities that the sequential framework of turn-taking enforces the participants to assume.

In sum, the coordination of actions in terms of turn-taking enables forms of experience sharing that the concurrent organization could not afford. This suggests that one motivation underlying the human propensity to coordinate their actions in terms of turn-taking could be the human propensity to share experiences. Even more, there might be a bidirectional linkage of enhancement between these two propensities.

# **References**

Barresi, J., and Moore, C. (2008). "The neuroscience of social understanding," in *The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity*, eds J. Zlatev, T. P. Racine, C. Sinha, and E. Itkonen (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 39–66. doi: 10.1075/celcr.12.05bar

# **Consequences for the Study of Turn-Taking**

We have now considered two alternative hypotheses about how the relationship between experience sharing and turn-taking could be viewed. What consequences would these imply for the study of turn-taking?

According to our first hypothesis, the home environment of experience sharing is in the concurrent framework of emotional reciprocity, while there is a tension between experience sharing and the sequential framework of turn-taking. If this hypothesis is valid, then there must be evidence that, not only does a lesser amount of experience sharing lead to a greater amount of turn-taking, and vice versa, but also, that turn-taking obstructs experience sharing. Furthermore, if turn-taking is there to facilitate instrumental communication (instead of experience sharing), then we would expect that there would be a tension between overlapping vocalizations and effective instrumental communication. While there is some evidence for the tension between turn-taking and experience sharing (Enfield, 2011; Heritage, 2011; Vatanen, 2014), the potentially problematic combination of overlapping vocalizations and effective instrumental communication has rather been taken for granted than really unpacked through empirical investigation (cf. Stevanovic and Frick, 2014). One further challenge from the perspective of this hypothesis would be to account for the occurrences of overlapping talk serving instrumental purposes.

According to the second hypothesis, turn-taking is in the service of experience sharing. In allowing the participants to engage in increasingly complex forms of joint action, and, hence, in ever more exciting shared experiences, there seems to be no tension between turn-taking and experience sharing. From this perspective, there seems to be a developmental continuity between the early infant-caretaker interactions governed by emotional reciprocity and the later, more complex forms of social interaction. If this hypothesis is valid, then there must be evidence that the instances of experience sharing cast in the sequential framework of turn-taking can, in principle, reach at least the same level of intensity as those occurring in the context of overlapping talk. Moreover, one would need to show that occurrences of experience sharing and instrumental goal-pursuit would be relatively evenly distributed between the instances of overlapping talk and talk abiding to the norms of turn-taking.

No matter which of the above hypothese is more valid than the other, the relationship between experience sharing and turntaking is something worth further investigation—something that this paper has sought to highlight.

# **Acknowledgments**

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland (Decision No. 274735).

Beebe, B., and Stern, D. (1977). "Engagement-disengagement and early object experiences," in *Communicative Structures and Psychic Structures*, eds N. Freedman and S. Grand (New York: Plenum), 35–55. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4757-0492-1\_3

Beebe, B., Stern, D., and Jaffe, J. (1979). "The kinesic rhythm of mother-infant interactions," in *Of Speech and Time: Temporal Patterns in Interpersonal Contexts*, eds A. Siegman and S. Feldstein (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 23–34.

eds J. Zlatev, T. P. Racine, C. Sinha, and E. Itkonen (Amsterdam: Benjamins), 67–88. doi: 10.1075/celcr.12.06hob

Rochat, P. (2001). *The Infant's World*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

**Conflict of Interest Statement:** The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

*Copyright © 2015 Stevanovic and Peräkylä. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.*

# Turn-timing in signed conversations: coordinating stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries

### *Connie de Vos 1\*, Francisco Torreira1 and Stephen C. Levinson1,2*

*1 Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2 Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands*

In spoken interactions, interlocutors carefully plan, and time their utterances, minimizing gaps and overlaps between consecutive turns. Cross-linguistic comparison has indicated that spoken languages vary only minimally in terms of turn-timing, and language acquisition research has shown pre-linguistic vocal turn-taking in the first half year of life. These observations suggest that the turn-taking system may provide a fundamental basis for our linguistic capacities. The question remains, however, to what extent our capacity for rapid turn-taking is determined by modality constraints. The avoidance of overlapping turns could be motivated by the difficulty of hearing and speaking at the same time. If so, turn-taking in sign might show greater toleration for overlap. Alternatively, signed conversations may show a similar distribution of turn-timing as spoken languages, thus avoiding both gaps and overlaps. To address this question we look at turn-timing in question–answer sequences in spontaneous conversations of Sign Language of the Netherlands. The findings indicate that although there is considerable overlap in two or more signers' articulators in conversation, when proper allowance is made for onset preparation, post-utterance retraction and the intentional holding of signs for response, turn-taking latencies in sign look remarkably like those reported for spoken language. This is consistent with the possibility that, at least with regard to responses to questions, speakers and signers follow similar time courses in planning and producing their utterances in on-going conversation. This suggests that turn-taking systems may well be a shared cognitive infrastructure underlying all modern human languages, both spoken and signed.

Keywords: turn-taking, turn-timing, visual-gestural modality, sign language, sign phonetics, conversation analysis

# Introduction

Spontaneous conversations among speakers often run smoothly with slight overlaps and gaps between consecutive turns (Sacks et al., 1974). Comparative research has shown that speakers from a broad range of typologically and geographically dispersed languages vary little in response latencies in question–answer sequences, with mean overall offsets at 229 ms, and language-specific means within 250 ms on either side of this cross-language mean (Stivers et al., 2009). A general observation in studies of spoken interaction is that speakers orient toward a one-at-a-time principle when taking turns at talk, and do so at a surprisingly fast pace across a wide range of

### *Edited by:*

*Gabriella Vigliocco, University College London, UK*

### *Reviewed by:*

*Wendy Sandler, University of Haifa, Israel Simon Garrod, University of Glasgow, UK*

### *\*Correspondence:*

*Connie de Vos, Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, 6500AH Nijmegen, Netherlands<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
### *Specialty section:*

*This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology*

> *Received: 21 November 2014 Accepted: 23 February 2015 Published: 24 March 2015*

### *Citation:*

*de Vos C, Torreira F and Levinson SC (2015) Turn-timing in signed conversations: coordinating stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries. Front. Psychol. 6:268. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00268* spoken languages. The universality of this tightly organized behavior in spoken conversation, as well as its clear precursors in early infancy, make a case for turn-taking constituting an important part of human communicative ethology (Levinson, 2006). A leading question for the research reported here is to what extent sign language users also operate the same turn-taking system as used in spoken languages, especially with regard to turn-timing.

One of the substantial discoveries of the last 50 years is that sign languages show all the properties of full natural languages on all relevant levels of linguistic structure, including, for instance, sublexical structure at the phonological level (Emmorey, 2002; Meier et al., 2002; Sandler and Lillo-Martin, 2006; Channon and van der Hulst, 2011; Berent et al., 2013). However, it has been suggested that, in conversational turntaking, signers may show greater toleration for overlap due to the characteristics of the visual modality. In signed conversation, visual feedback does not interfere with sign-production, in the same way that auditive feedback does when speaking (Emmorey et al., 2009). This suggests that, if turn-taking was basically motivated by channel limitations (the difficulty of hearing and speaking at the same time), then signed turn-timing should be characterized by a higher proportion of overlapping turns. Additionally, Coates and Sutton-Spence (2001) argue that unlike speakers, signers do not attend to the one-at-a-time principle, and rather form a collaborative floor with their interlocutors, thus having higher degrees of social tolerance for overlap.

Conversation analytic work on sign languages has been sparse, yet early studies of signed conversations have observed some remarkable features of signed interactions. Baker (1977) was the first to note that unlike speakers, sign language users need to ensure visual attention of their interlocutors before they can initiate a turn, hence the use of various types of summonses is more pervasive in signed interaction due to the localized nature of visual information, which requires attentional focus (McIlvenny, 1995). In addition to explicit attention-getting gestures such as waves and taps, this may be done by repeating the initial sign of a turn until recipiency is confirmed through eye contact. The latter strategy appears akin to recycling turn beginnings in spoken conversation, but has the specific purpose of mobilizing recipiency (cf. Schegloff, 1987). In multi-party conversation, multiple signers may self-select for the next turn and thus initiate signing at the same time, although such overlaps may not always be attended to. In addition, there are many other cases of overlapping movement of participants' articulators. As such it is important to consider, in the case of sign language, whether overlapping signs are in fact attended to as competitive turns by speech act participants (McIlvenny, 1995; McCleary and de Arantes Leite, 2013; Groeber and Pochon-Berger, 2014). In the current study, we consider turns that make relevant a timely and contingent response on behalf of the addressee, namely question and answer sequences.

In spoken conversation, addressees sometimes initiate a response at a possible point of completion while the initial speaker continues his turn, thus resulting in *terminal overlap* (Jefferson, 1986; Schegloff, 2000). Similarly, Baker (1977) observed the phenomenon of *partial overlap* at signed turn transitions when "one interactant's hand(s) moving toward the position where a sign will be made as the other interactant is making a sign." However, in considering the comparison between spoken and signed languages, we must bear in mind that the preparation for vocalization in spoken languages is mostly inaccessible to other participants, consisting apart from inbreaths in early motor preparation of the vocal organs (Palo et al., 2014). Therefore, as argued by McCleary and de Arantes Leite (2013), these preparatory movements in sign function on a par with pre-turn inbreaths or other pre-vocal preparation in spoken languages and thus should arguably be excluded from the analysis of the actual exchange of turns. That is to say, it seems reasonable, in order to compare signed, and spoken interactions on equal grounds, to exclude the preparation for signing from timing analysis, as has been the case with the preparation for speaking in the analysis of spoken turn-taking (McCleary and de Arantes Leite, 2013). In our analysis of turn-timing, we differentiate between partial overlaps and possible completion overlaps by taking the start of the initial *stroke* (the 'content' part of the manual gesture) as the turn beginning as it most directly reflects the phonological content of a sign.

Overlap at signed turn transitions may also result from turnfinal holds, which are typically released as soon as the relevant response has been recognized (Groeber and Pochon-Berger, 2014). Crucially, signers do not orient to these practices as troublesome in conversation, nor do such overlaps get dealt with using designated overlap resolution devices (cf. Schegloff, 2000; McCleary and de Arantes Leite, 2013). We thus hypothesized that in optimizing turn transitions, sign language users focus on the phonological content of signs as represented by the stroke, and disregard early preparatory movements, and the intentional holding of signs for response, as well as post-utterance retraction. In other words, the end of the final stroke appears to most directly parallel the transition relevance place (TRP) at which a contingent response on behalf of the interlocutor becomes relevant (Sacks et al., 1974).

If turn-taking lies deep in our communicational instincts as has been suggested (Levinson, 2006), then it may be expected to follow broadly similar lines regardless of language modality. We therefore test the prediction that in signed conversations, interlocutors attend to stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries. If this were the case, turn-timing in signed interactions as calculated by stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries should be within the same cross-linguistic range as has previously been reported for spoken languages.

To address this question we analyze turn-timing in 190 question–answer sequences captured from spontaneous conversations of Sign Language of the Netherlands Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT). Questions–answer sequences provide a particularly well-suited conversational context in which to investigate turn-timing, as questions make due a conditionally relevant and timely response (cf. Stivers et al., 2009). The signs for each question–answer sequence were coded and checked by native signers for onset, lexical content, and holds and decays using the coding system originally devised for both co-speech gesture and sign language by Kita et al. (1998).

The paper is structured as follows. Section "Materials and Methods" provides details on our data collection as well as the annotation scheme. Section "Results" presents a statistical comparison of turn-timing in the NGT sample to the spoken languages as reported by Stivers et al. (2009). Finally, section "Discussion" discusses the methodological implications of our work.

# Materials and Methods

## The NGT Interactive Corpus

This study exploits the NGT Interactive corpus, which consists of spontaneous conversations of native NGT signers in informal settings, which have been collected, and analyzed by Merel van Zuilen, Stephen C. Levinson and Connie de Vos (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), and Onno Crasborn (Radboud University) from early 2011 onward. All data and analyses have been ethically approved by the Radboud University Ethical committee under the research program *De structuur en ontwikkeling van conversaties in gebarentaal* (De Vos and Levinson; project code ECG2012-1304-098).

The recording sessions of the NGT Interactive corpus took place in participants' homes, at various deaf clubs, as well as a small restaurant, between participants who were long-term acquaintances and friends. These signers were also very familiar with the research assistant who recorded them, and who is a deaf native signer of NGT herself. The data therefore has the character of natural conversation. All conversations were recorded using two HD cameras from different camera angles. The data on which the present study is based features 16 signers (seven females) in one triadic and six dyadic interactions totaling 11 h and 2 min of raw video data. In one of the dyadic interactions, a third person occasionally joined the conversation, but did not participate in any of the question–answer sequences in our analysis. For this reason, this recording is treated as a dyadic interaction. All but one of the signers included in this study had acquired NGT early in life, before the age of ten and all three variants of NGT – Northern, Western, and Southern – are represented in the sample. Conversation topics ranged, unprompted by the investigators, from a work meeting regarding the write-up of a professional paper, home improvement activities, the history of the deaf club, and interpersonal relations.

The video recordings were compressed into MPEG2 format at 1920 × 1080 resolution and 25 fps. The relevant sections were then translated into written Dutch and annotated further using ELAN video annotation software (Crasborn and Sloetjes, 2008). As is customary in sign language research, each sign was glossed using a designated ID-gloss stemming from the Corpus NGT (Crasborn and de Meijer, 2012), and supplemented with novel ID-glosses whenever necessary. Non-manual signals, such as head and body movements, eyebrow movement, and eyegaze were coded in multiple independent tiers.

# Identification of Question–Answer Sequences

In order to ensure a diverse sample of question–answer sequences, we selected 30 min segments from each video file that were dense in turn transitions. In identifying these sequences, we adopted the selection criteria which were originally developed as part of the MPI Coding Scheme for Question–Response Sequences in Conversation at the MPI for Psycholinguistics (Enfield et al., 2003) and form the basis of Stivers et al. (2009). NGT polar questions are canonically marked out by raised eyebrows and a head tilt, while content questions are accompanied by a frown (Coerts, 1992). It is also syntactically possible for a content question to be formed in the absence of a wh-sign, as long as the signer uses furrowed brows. More recent work on NGT has also indicated that the brow movements associated with different question types may also be affected by paralinguistic factors, such as affect, and that these non-manual signals are therefore not a reliable cue to syntactic sentence type (De Vos et al., 2009). For these reasons, all questions in our sample were selected based on functional criteria, regardless of whether they made use of an interrogative sentence type. Specifically, we included all turns that evoked an informative answer on behalf of the addressee. Questions that were offered in reported speech, requests for physical actions, rhetorical questions, and two or more questions that were subsequently delivered in a single turn were excluded from the analysis.

Importantly, sign languages are essentially multi-modal in nature in the sense that signers do not only use their hands but also their facial expressions and body postures to express meaning at the linguistic and paralinguistic level. The non-manual components are sometimes considered as the equivalent of intonation or prosody in sign (see for instance van der Kooij et al., 2006; De Vos et al., 2009 on NGT). In the interactions we studied, a facial expression functioned on occasion as a turn on its own, for example when the combined use of a frown with a nose wrinkle and eyegaze at the addressee was taken as an open class repair initiator (similar to spoken *huh?*). Similarly, in some contexts, polar questions evoked a minimal response such as a head nod (*yes*) or a side-to-side headshake (*no*). Stivers et al. (2009) report that in spoken interactions, such visible behaviors result in faster turn transition times compared to vocal-only responses in the majority of languages in their sample. Similarly, non-manual signals in sign languages may often times persist beyond question boundaries and it is unclear at present to what extent each signal should be regarded as part of the turn at talk (De Vos et al., 2009; McCleary and de Arantes Leite, 2013). Our current analyses are therefore focused on the propositional content of the utterance as expressed by the movements of the hands. These manual movements are phonologically specified as part of the language and are most comparable to spoken words as such. Consequently, we have excluded 24 items of the original data set in which either the question or its response were solely expressed non-manually. The remaining set of functional questions were further categorized into polar questions and content questions resulting in a total data set of 190 questions, of which were 104 polar questions and 86 content questions. Overall, polar questions were thus slightly more common than content questions, as is the case in nine out of the 10 spoken language samples analyzed by Stivers et al. (2009:10588). All of the 16 signers that contributed to the corpus are represented in the sample as both questioner and answerer. The triadic conversation included 42 question answer sequences, whereas the dyadic conversations included 44, 28, 28, 23, 16, and 9 question–answer sequences, respectively.

# Movement Phase Coding

Our analysis of turn-timing is based on the coding of the various movement phases that make up a sign. Specifically, we adopted the movement phase coding developed for Sign Language of the Netherlands and co-speech gesture (Kita et al., 1998). This coding system distinguishes four movement phases for each sign: preparation, stroke, hold, and retraction. These movement phases are illustrated in **Figures 1A–D**. This figure displays all four movement phases in relation to the Dutch sign for 'brother,' which is produced by touching the contra-lateral upper arm twice with the middle and index fingers extended. During the preparation phase the hands move into position and the lexically-specified hand shape is selected (**Figure 1A**). The stroke most directly represents the phonological form of a sign and includes the internal movement of a sign, in this case touching the contra-lateral upper arm (**Figure 1B**). Subsequently to the stroke, a signer might hold a sign during interaction, for example to mobilize a response in their interlocutor (**Figure 1C**). Finally, the sign may be retracted and the hands move into resting position (**Figure 1D**).

Importantly, each sign is minimally associated with a single stroke, but the other three movement phases do not always occur (Kita et al., 1998). This analysis is compatible with the view that signs tend to be monosyllabic, consisting typically of a single phase (a path movement and/or a single handinternal movement) or a repetition of a path movement or handinternal movement (cf. Coulter, 1982; Brentari, 1998; Sandler, 1999; van der Kooij and Crasborn, 2008). The beginning and end points of each stroke were identified on the basis of the initial and final frame in which the lexically-specified hand shapes for the relevant sign were fully formed. Furthermore, for signs that include a phonologically specified internal movement, the stroke may be lengthened by a repetition of this internal movement, rather than transitioning into an utterance-final hold (cf. Perlmutter, 1992; Nespor and Sandler, 1999; Stewart, 2014). We have also observed this phenomenon our NGT data set, and in such cases only the initial inherent movement, which is lexicallyspecified, was included into the stroke.

For a subset of items (59 questions) a second coder, who is also a native signer of Sign Language of the Netherlands, applied the same Gesture Phase coding system. Subsequently, any items that showed discrepancies of more than two video frames were discussed, and adjusted when necessary. In a few cases these differences were based in a distinct phonological analysis of the signs that were being used and these two interpretations could not be reconciled. After these discussion sessions the overall correlations between these two coders was 0.9 for the sign-naive boundary measures and 0.98 for the stroke-to-stroke boundary measures.

## Phonetic Measures

In our study we report on three phonetic measures of turn transition times based on the coding of gesture phases. The first measure looks at sign-naive turn-boundaries and includes all manual actions, that is, all movement phases that make up a signer's utterance. The second measure looks at stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries, which run from the start of the initial stroke of a turn till the end of the turn-final stroke. For each signer, gestural movement phases from both hands were taken into account. The third and final measure calculates the offset of the addressee's preparation phase with respect to the end of the question's final stroke, and is called signed utterance launch. **Figure 2** illustrates each of the reported phonetic measures schematically. In section "Results," each of these phonetic measures of signed turntiming are compared to findings from the spoken turn-timing in cross-linguistic study presented by Stivers et al. (2009).

**Figure 3** displays an excerpt from the corpus to exemplify the three phonetic measures. This question–answer sequence stems from a conversation between two males who are close friends living in the North of the Netherlands. They are discussing remodeling activities while enjoying lunch on a roof top terrace. Directly preceding the excerpt, the signer to the viewer's right (R) indicates his misunderstanding using a minimal repair initiator by furrowing his brows and leaning forward similar to a spoken '*huh?*' (cf. Dingemanse et al., 2013). As explained above,

FIGURE 1 | The four gestural movement phases of the Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT) sign BROER '*brother'*: (A) preparation, (B) stroke, (C) hold, and (D) retraction.

FIGURE 2 | Schematic representation of the three different phonetic measures reported in this study: sign-naive turn-boundaries, stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries, and launching sentence articulation.

when questions were formed without manual movements these were not included into the current analysis. In this example, each signer uses only a single hand to produce the relevant signs. At the start of the excerpt, the signer on the left (L) asks how far along signer R has progressed regarding the renovation of a particular venue. His question ends in the lexical sign HERE (Dutch:

*hier*), which is formed by a downward index finger point, and co-produced with the Dutch mouth movement *nu* 'now.' At the end of his question, the sign HERE is immediately retracted over 430 ms without a sentence-final hold, presumably because the addressee (signer R) has already raised his hand to produce an appropriate response. Signer R's answer starts off with the sign NOW, and he initiates the preparation of this initial sign before signer L has initiated the start of the preparation of his final sign. As a result, both signers overlap by 690 ms according to the sign-naive turn boundary measure and the launch of R's sentence articulation has a negative value of −260 ms. According to the stroke-to-stroke measurement, however, there is a slight gap of 30 ms between both turns. This turn transition is detailed in (**Figure 3A**) which displays snapshots from both camera angels of the final frame of Signer L's turn-final stroke. On the left-hand side there is a clear view of signer L and the end state of the sign HERE. The camera view on the right-hand side clearly shows signer R who is in the middle of the preparation phase of his turn-initial NOW; the white arrow indicates the trajectory of its stroke. The exact timing of this turn transition is illustrated by a scaled representation of the gestural movements of this turn transition in **Figure 3B**.

# Results

## The Timing of Question–Answer Sequences

To test whether signers optimize turn-taking on the basis of stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries, we compared turn transition times in NGT with turn transition times in spoken question– answer sequences in ten languages as reported in Stivers et al. (2009). In what follows, we adopt the Floor Transfer Offset (FTO) representation used in De Ruiter et al. (2006), in which gaps are measured in positive milliseconds, overlaps in negative milliseconds. **Figure 4A** shows a density plot of turn transition offset for the overall data set according to the sign-naive turn boundary measure. The sign-naive boundary measure calculates turn-timing by including all gestural movement phases of the hands. According to this phonetic measure, the average offset of answers to questions was −812 ms, the median was −607 ms, and the mode (estimated with the density() function in R set to default parameters; R Core Team, 2014, and corresponding to the highest value in the density plot in **Figure 4A**) was −361 ms. These negative values of central tendency indicate that addressees generally start signing well before the question has fully ended. The average value of −687 ms was 6.18 SDs below the cross-linguistic average turn transition time as estimated from Stivers et al. (2009); *m* = 229 ms, SD = 168 ms). Assuming that average turn transition times across spoken languages are normally distributed, and using the data reported in Stivers et al. (2009) to estimate the parameters of this distribution, the probability of observing such a value in this distribution or lower is extremely low (*p <* 0.0001). The sign-naive turn boundary measure thus suggests that the timing of responses to questions in the visual modality deviates substantially from oral-auditory turn-taking in that it exhibits both more and more extended overlap.

Secondly, we calculated turn-timing following the stroke-tostroke boundary measure, which is based on the hypothesis that signers observe stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries. This phonetic measure calculates the offset of the answerer's initial stroke with respect to the end of the final stroke of the questioner. **Figure 4B** shows a density plot of the stroke-to-stroke turn boundary measure. According to this measure, turn transition times in NGT now exhibit a positive gap, with an average of 307 ms, a median of 269 ms, and an estimated mode of 227 ms. The average value of 307 ms was only 0.46 SD above the cross-linguistic average turn transition time as estimated from Stivers et al. (2009). Assuming that the distribution of average turn transition times across spoken languages is normal, and using the numbers in Stivers et al. (2009), the probability of observing a value of 372 ms or higher is well above the commonly used alpha level of 2.5% for a two-tailed test (*p* = 0.32). When we exclude utterance-initial preparatory movements, and utterance-final holds and decays, turn-timing in signed interaction thus falls within range of oralauditory turn-taking as reported by Stivers et al. (2009). This is illustrated in **Figure 5**, which shows the average turn transition times in Stivers et al. (2009) plus our two NGT measures.

# The Proportion of Overlapping and Delayed Turn Transitions

Another way of looking at signed versus spoken turn-timing is by comparing the distributions of overlapping and delayed turn

transitions. Heldner (2011) previously showed that, with regard to spoken Swedish the threshold for noticeable gaps and overlaps lies at FTOs of 120 ms and −120 ms, respectively. At the moment, it is unknown whether this threshold would generalize to other spoken languages, e.g., to those that have relatively fast or slow turn transition time on average, such as Japanese or Danish, or indeed to sign language. Notwithstanding this caveat, for the sake of comparability, we here consider any turn transition offsets that exceed 120 ms as turns with a noticeable gap, and any turn transition offsets that are −120 ms or less as overlapping in order to compare the distributions of the NGT sample to the Stivers et al. (2009) study.

**Figure 6** presents an overview of the percentages of overlapping answers to questions, including the data reported in this study. As estimated by Heldner (2011) based on data from Stivers et al. (2009), the proportion of overlapping turn transitions in question–answer sequences, may range from 13.5% as reported of Lao to 40.0% as reported for spoken Japanese, with a mean of 26.01% and SD of 8.2%. When considering stroketo-stroke boundaries, 29.8% of responses to questions come in

overlap, which is within the cross-linguistic range. Assuming that the distribution of percentages of overlaps in the cross-linguistic sample is normally distributed, and using the data in Stivers et al. (2009) to estimate its parameters, the probability of observing this value or higher in such distribution is well above the commonly used alpha level of 5% (*p* = 0.28). According to the sign-naive measure, however, 82.2% of answers overlap with the respective question. This percentage clearly falls outside the cross-linguistic range for spoken languages. The probability of observing this value or a higher value in the cross-linguistic distribution is extremely low (*p <* 0.00001).

**Figure 7** presents an overview of the percentages of transitions between answers and questions involving a gap of more than 120 ms, including the data reported in this study. As estimated by Heldner (2011) based on Stivers et al. (2009), the proportion of delayed turn transitions in question–answer sequences may range from 41.1% as reported of Japanese to 73.0% as reported for spoken Lao. When considering stroke-to-stroke boundaries in the sign language data, 58.3% of responses to questions had a gap of 120 ms or more; this is within the cross-linguistic expectations. Assuming that the distribution of percentages of overlaps in the cross-linguistic sample is normally distributed, the probability of observing a value of 58.3% or lower is well above 5% (*p* = 0.54). According to the sign-naive measure, however, only 17.8% of answers overlap with the respective question, which would be three times less than the spoken language which allows for the smallest number of delays in question– answer sequences. The probability of observing this value or a lower value in the cross-linguistic distribution is much lower (*p <* 0.00001).

### Launching Utterance Articulation in Sign

Unlike spoken languages, signed languages offer us the unique opportunity to examine turn preparation using non-invasive methods. In our data, the preparatory phase of utterances had an average duration of 474 ms, a median of 280 ms, and an estimated mode of 255 ms. We computed a third turn transition timing measure corresponding to the latency between the end of the final stroke of the question and the onset of the initial preparatory movements of answer articulation. Relative to the end of the final stroke of the question, response articulation in our data starts with an average latency of −86 ms, a median latency of −78 ms and a modal latency of −53 ms. The timing of preparatory movements in sign is thus slightly earlier than the initiation of pre-utterance inbreaths in answers to questions in spoken Dutch (15 ms; Torreira et al., 2015). We return to this point in the discussion section. **Table 1** summarizes all main results from the present corpus analysis.

# Turn-Timing in Dyadic vs. Triadic Interactions

As explained in Section "The NGT Interactive Corpus," one of the recordings in our corpus consisted of a triadic interaction, the other six involving dyadic conversations. Because turn-timing might differ between triadic and dyadic interactions (e.g., due to increased competition for the floor), we examined each of the timing measures presented in the previous subsections (i.e., sign-naive turn boundaries, stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries, and the launching of utterance articulation) as a function of the number of participants in the interaction. We fitted a series of mixed-effects regression models with each of the timing measures as the response, number of participants (dyadic vs. triadic) as a fixed factor, and conversation as a random factor. None of the three models yielded a statistical effect for the fixed factor number of participants (*p >* 0.1 in all three cases), indicating that the triadic conversation was not significantly different from the dyadic conversations in terms of turn-timing.

TABLE 1 | Summary of main results: mean, median, and mode for each phonetic measure of turn-boundaries (in milliseconds).

# Discussion

This study uses a corpus analysis of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) in order to address the question as to what degree turn-timing in signed conversation differs from turntiming in spoken conversation. The present study has focused on responses to questions, as questions require a timely and contingently relevant response, and could therefore serve as a baseline measure as to how much overlap or gap might be allowed in a given language. Moreover, the timing of responses to questions has been documented in a wide range of spoken languages (Stivers et al., 2009), thus allowing for a controlled comparison to turn-timing across modalities. On the basis of the corpus analysis of spontaneous interactions in NGT, we find that signed conversation exhibits a significantly greater amount of overlap than spoken conversation when we consider all hand action phases as being part of a turn, i.e., preparation, stroke, hold and retraction movements (cf. Kita et al., 1998). Interestingly, however, when we only consider the lexically-specified movement of the hands, i.e., the strokes, turn transition times in signed conversation are clearly within the cross-linguistic range reported for spoken languages, with an estimated mode of 227 ms, and with comparable amounts of gaps and overlaps. We have also found that the timing of the beginning of the preparation phase of the response relative to the end of the last stroke of the question is slightly earlier in signed conversation than that of pre-utterance inbreaths in spoken Dutch conversation, with modes of −53 ms vs. 15 ms.

As noted in the introduction, it has previously been claimed that signed conversation exhibits more overlap than spoken conversation. Coates and Sutton-Spence (2001), for instance, have argued that signers, unlike speakers, may not adhere to a one-at-a-time principle in turn-taking. Rather, they suggest that sign language users are oriented toward a collaborative floor in which more overlap is permitted and socially valued. McCleary and de Arantes Leite (2013) criticized this study for not specifying what types of turns-at-talk may legitimately be used in overlap, and for not providing precise temporal values regarding the use of the various articulators. The present study has shown that, at least in responses to questions, turntiming in signed conversation looks remarkably similar to that of spoken conversation if we define the delineation of turns on the basis of their stroke phases only (i.e., excluding preparatory, retraction, and hold phases). The decision to consider stroke phases alone is not an arbitrary one, since strokes encode the phonological content of an utterance more directly than other hand movements. In making a comparison between spoken and signed languages, it is therefore plausible that preparatory and

retraction movements in signed conversation are best seen as parallel to the pre-beginnings and post-completion elements of spoken turns (cf. Schegloff, 1987), and that TRPs are best approximated by the end of the last stroke. Experimental and qualitative research should address these issues combining the descriptive rigor of Conversation Analysis with perception experiments.

We have also seen that, using the stroke-to-stroke measures, the proportions of turn transitions with noticeable gaps and overlaps in NGT is within the same range as spoken languages according to the stroke-to-stroke boundary measure. These comparisons were carried out on the assumption that the threshold for noticeable gaps and overlaps lies at FTOs of 120 ms and −120 ms, respectively (cf. Heldner, 2011, based on data from Stivers et al., 2009). At present, however, it is unclear as to whether sign languages users are as sensitive to gaps or overlaps as speakers are. These questions could be addressed, for instance, by manipulating turn transition times in pre-recorded signed conversations.