Sociolinguistic and multimodal variation of turn-taking dynamics in conversation
Turn-taking refers to the process by which interlocutors alternate between speakership and listenership in conversation. While across languages a tendency has been observed to keep silent gaps and speech overlaps reduced to a minimum in the timing of the alternation between interlocutors gaps and overlaps are not at all absent from everyday spontaneous interaction. This thesis explores the hypothesis that these perceived deviations from a possible universal turn-taking system have a socio-cultural and contextual nature. Since informal conversation is the prime social environment for identity construction and language use, turn-taking dynamics, i.e., turn allocation techniques and the distribution and timing of turn-taking actions among interlocutors, can reveal information about the interaction's setting and the interlocutors' socio-cultural identity, attitudes and values. Specifically, this dissertation investigates the dynamics of turn-taking in spontaneous face-to-face conversation by focusing on the influence of the gender of the interlocutors, the availability of multiple communication modalities (visual and vocal), and the language in which the exchange takes place through a comparison of German and Swedish. The findings indicate strong links between how acoustic turn-taking cues are used to manage conversations and the gender of both the speaker and listener. Moreover, the cross-linguistic analysis sheds light on language-specific variations in listeners' multimodal behavior and gender-specific patterns across languages. Finally, despite their similarities, the comparison of German and Swedish reveals significant differences in how turn-taking is implemented by interlocutors in the two languages, indicating that turn-taking dynamics are highly sensitive to variations in the linguistic and sociolinguistic background of the speakers.
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