Turn-taking in Conversations

The mechanisms by which people take turns speaking in a conversation are both spoken and nonverbal, open and subconscious. A child of five enters a room where his mother and another woman are talking. The child tugs on his mother‘s skirt for attention and, without waiting for her to respond, he begins talking to her. The mother be-comes irritated and scolds the child for interrupting while she is talking. Fiue college students are sitting in a dorm room talking. One of the five students has been talking for about ten minutes when another member of the group says, “Jim, why don’t you shut up! Z can’t get a word in edgewise.” In each of the preceding stories, the central figure is guilty of violating a communicative norm in our culture. And, in each case, the response was in the form of a reprimand. At least two explanations account for the repri-mands given to the central figures in the stories: (a) they did not provide for a smooth transition of the speaking turn from one person to the next, and (b) they forced a definition of the situation that the other interactants present were not willing to accept. The nature of this conversational “turn-taking ” or “floor apportionment ” will be the focus of this essay. The phenomenon by which one interactant stops talking and another starts in a smooth, synchroniLed manner is considered the most salient feature of face-to-face conversation by some researchers (12, 19, 20). The fact that we usually make judgments about people based on the way they interact argues that the structure of a conversation-the way it “comes off”-is at least as important as the content.