Research project
Who’s next?: The role of speech melody in the turn-taking system of Dutch
When we are in a conversation, how do we know exactly when to respond, and how do we manage to respond so swiftly, yet without interrupting our interlocutors? Can speech melody – in particular utterance final “boundary tones” – help us determine who will speak next, or are these cues too late in the speech signal to guide turn-taking in Dutch?
- Duration
- 2025 - 2029
- Contact
- Johanneke Caspers
- Funding
- NWO Open Competition M
In natural conversation, participants take turns in producing speech utterances – a process that is extremely rapid and precisely timed, and where long pauses and interruptions are rare. The most puzzling aspect about this turn-taking system is that the mean gaps between speakers are shorter than the time it takes to prepare an utterance. This means that listeners in general have to project the end of a turn before it occurs in order to prepare their own turn and deliver it in time. How is this done? More specifically, what is the function of melodic aspects in this process? The intonation at the end of utterances seems relevant to turn-taking (indicating e.g. the end of a turn, a question, or a ‘comma’ signaling further talk by the same speaker), but at the same time it seems that listeners cannot wait for this information to come in. While unravelling the incoming message, you already have to prepare your next turn.
Earlier work on the role of speech melody in Dutch turn-taking suggests that the lack of a final high or low boundary tone functions as an independent turn-keeper. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding the possible interactive function of the high boundary tone. This rising tone not only frequently appears on the final syllable of questions and may therefore function as a turn-yielding cue, but can also indicate that the current speaker wants to continue speaking (comma-intonation). The relevance of this rising final tone for projecting possible turn-taking is still unclear.
The approach to investigating turn-taking is split into two virtually separate worlds: in the conversation analysis approach, every relevant aspect of a specific conversation is annotated – from semantic, pragmatic and lexico-syntactic information to typical characteristics of spoken language such as pauses, loudness variation and speech melody – and generalisation is seen as undesirable. In the cognitive approach to turn-taking, larger sets of conversational data are analysed and quantified and psycholinguistic experiments are performed to find out how humans are able to interact so swiftly. The current project combines these two approaches – corpus analysis and manipulated dialogue – to investigate whether and how utterance final speech melody is used in the turn-taking system of Dutch.