Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations

This paper explores durational aspects of pauses, gaps and overlaps in three different conversational corpora with a view to challenge claims about precision timing in turn-taking. Distributions of pause, gap and overlap durations in conversations are presented, and methodological issues regarding the statistical treatment of such distributions are discussed. The results are related to published minimal response times for spoken utterances and thresholds for detection of acoustic silences in speech. It is shown that turn-taking is generally less precise than is often claimed by researchers in the field of conversation analysis or interactional linguistics. These results are discussed in the light of their implications for models of timing in turn-taking, and for interaction control models in speech technology. In particular, it is argued that the proportion of speaker changes that could potentially be triggered by information immediately preceding the speaker change is large enough for reactive interaction controls models to be viable in speech technology.