hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
Conversational turns often proceed with
very brief pauses between speakers. In order to maintain “no gap, no overlap” turntaking, we must be able to anticipate when an ongoing utterance will end, tracking the current speaker for upcoming points of potential floor exchange. The precise set of cues that listeners use for turn-end boundary anticipation is not yet established. We used an eyetracking paradigm to measure adults’ and children’s online turn processing as they watched videos of conversations in their native language (English) and a range of other languages they did not speak. Both adults and children anticipated speaker transitions effectively. In addition,
we observed evidence of turn-boundary anticipation for questions even in languages
that were unknown to participants, suggesting that listeners’ success in turn-end anticipation does not rely solely on lexical information.
