Turn-taking

Turn-taking is a type of organization in conversation and discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. In practice, it involves processes for constructing contributions, responding to previous comments, and transitioning to a different speaker, using a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic cues.

While the structure is generally universal, that is, overlapping talk is generally avoided and silence between turns is minimized, turn-taking conventions vary by culture and community. Conventions vary in many ways, such as how turns are distributed, how transitions are signaled, or how long the average gap is between turns.

Sensitivity to turn-taking exists in other species and develops early in humans, emerging within the first year of life. Two-month-olds can recognize whether a human partner or an object responds to infants’ own actions in a contingent manner. From seven months of age, infants can understand that such turn-taking reactivity is shown by psychological agents. From 10 months of age, infants recognize that turn-taking is fundamental in communicative exchanges. They can identify the transfer of communicative information (or the lack of it) based on three dimensions of turn-taking contingent responding: the “when” (is it a turn-taking response?), “what” (is it a meaningful response?), and “how” (is it a congruent response?). Accordingly, the Contingency Cube theory posits that infants are capable of all these sophisticated inferences, because by relying on these three dimensions, they can keep track of the predictability of others’ reactions and decide whether a behavior is, for instance, communicative or not.

In many contexts, conversation turns are a valuable means to participate in social life and have been subject to competition. It is often thought that turn-taking strategies differ by gender; consequently, turn-taking has been a topic of intense examination in gender studies. While early studies supported gendered stereotypes, such as men interrupting more than women and women talking more than men, recent research has found mixed evidence of gender-specific conversational strategies, and few overarching patterns have emerged.