What are culture-specific ways of communication and why? - Turn-taking: universals vs. cultural variations

3 important questions on What are culture-specific ways of communication and why? - Turn-taking: universals vs. cultural variations

What are key features of how turns are allocated and transit from one speaker to another in conversation (Sacks et al., 1974)?

  • One party talks at a time
  • Overlaps occur, but are usually very brief
  • Turn order and size are not fixed, but vary
  • Turn allocation techniques are used either for self-selection or for the current speaker to select next

What is the result of a pause longer than 1 second in American English and Dutch conversations?

Any pause longer than that would either be treated as problematic by participants and require repaid such as topic shift, or be understood as a strategy to hedge a dispreferred response.

What did Stivers et al. (2009) find?

There are some cross-linguistic differences in the average gap between turns: Danish has the slowest response time on average, followed by Akhoe Haillom, Lao and Italian. English is slightly above the cross-linguistic mean. Japanese has the fastest response time.

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