The dynamics of conversational turn-taking: How does speech timing interact with neural entrainment?

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Adult conversationalists usually avoid both extended pauses and unintended overlaps between their turns, but it remains unclear how such fluent turn-taking is coordinated. The project investigates how speech timing influences fluency in conversational turn-taking in two languages with distinct timing patterns, English and Chinese. Through corpus analysis alongside behavioural and neuroscientific experiments, the project empirically tests the longstanding hypothesis that turn-taking fluency is promoted by entrainment of neural activity with the flow of syllables. More generally, it will contribute to a cross-linguistic understanding ofspeech timing in turn-taking, informed by the search for universal principles of perception and behaviour.