Sound Patterns and Linguistic Structures at the Transition Space in Conversation

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Interaction is fundamental to social behavior, and turn-taking is an essential component of interaction. Human interaction is unique in that it makes use of language as a medium, most notably in everyday conversation. Turn-taking in conversation may be easily taken for granted, but it has a complex systematic organization, and people who are participating in conversations are able to start speaking quickly when other speakers finish—so quickly that human cognitive abilities could not achieve such speed unless people are able make predictions about when and how other people’s conversational turns will end. The proposed research investigates at what times during conversation these predictions become relevant—that is, when a possible “turn-transition space” arises during a given speaker’s turn—and what kinds of linguistic information listeners use in order to make such predictions. In particular, we focus on prosodic variation: sound characteristics such as how loud or fast, or with what kinds of melodic patterns, words or sentences are spoken. The first portion of the project investigates prosodic variation in audio recordings of conversations, investigating different locations where transition space prediction could begin, and comparing findings in German and Swedish. The second portion tests these results in perception experiments, studying how people listening to conversations respond to different types of sound patterns, and in particular, how listeners from different languages interpret similar sound patterns. The results of the project will highlight ways in which different languages achieve similar communicative goals, and will give valuable insight into processes of human cognition for communication and interaction.