“Conversations have a far greater number of possible responses, which ought to saddle us with lengthy gaps between turns. Those don’t exist because we build our responses during our partner’s turn. We listen to their words while simultaneously crafting our own, so that when our opportunity comes, we seize it as quickly as it’s physically possible to.”
“they uncovered what Levinson describes as a “basic metabolism of human social life”— a universal tendency to minimize the silence between turns, without overlaps. (Overlaps only happened in 17 percent of turns, typically lasted for just 100 milliseconds, and were mostly slight misfires where one speaker unexpectedly drew out their last syllable.)”
“The brevity of these silences is doubly astonishing when you consider that it takes at least 600 milliseconds for us to retrieve a single word from memory and get ready to actually say it. For a short clause, that processing time rises to 1500 milliseconds. This means that we have to start planning our responses in the middle of a partner’s turn, using everything from grammatical cues to changes in pitch.”
““Everything points to what astute observers we are of every word choice, every phonetic change,” says Stivers.”
“The researchers also want to understand how turn-taking develops throughout our lives. So far, studies have shown that even six-month-old infants respond to their parents very quickly, albeit with more overlaps. At nine months, when they start to grasp that they’re actually communicating with another mind, they slow down. After that, it takes a surprisingly long time to get back to adult speeds. Stivers has found that even 8-year-olds, who have been speaking for many years, are still a few hundred milliseconds slower than adults. “That’s a puzzle that I don’t have answer to,” she says.”