The interaction of inter-turn silence with prosodic cues in listener perceptions of “trouble” in conversation

The forms, functions, and organization of sounds and utterances are generally the focus of speech communication research; little is known, however, about how the silence between speaker turns shades the meaning of the surrounding talk. We use an experimental protocol to test whether listeners’ perception of trouble in interaction (e.g., disagreement or unwillingness) varies when prosodic cues are manipulated in the context of 2 speech acts (requests and assessments). The prosodic cues investigated were inter-turn silence and the duration, absolute pitch, and pitch contour of affirmative response tokens (“yeah” and “sure”) that followed the inter-turn silence. Study participants evaluated spoken dialogues simulating telephone calls between friends in which the length of silence following a request/assessment (i.e., the inter-turn silence) was manipulated in Praat as were prosodic features of the responses. Results indicate that with each incremental increase in pause duration (0–600–1200 ms) listeners perceived increasingly less willingness to comply with requests and increasingly weaker agreement with assessments. Inter-turn silence and duration of response token proved to be stronger cues to unwillingness and disagreement than did the response token’s pitch characteristics. However, listeners tend to perceive response token duration as a cue to “trouble” when inter-turn silence cues were, apparently, ambiguous (less than 1 s).