Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns.
We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style.
there are arguments in favor of a universal system for turn-taking, that, as in English, follows a norm of “minimal-gap minimal-overlap”
If a community of speakers shows a highly regular target for the timing of turn transition, deviations will come to have a natural communicative significance (e.g., delays implying problems with the prior utterance), so giving rise to implicit norms of timely response that will be maintained to avoid such added implications
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