This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The…

Speakers use speech and gestures to represent referents in discourse. Depending on referents' information status, in speech speakers will vary richness of expression (e.g., lexical noun phrase [NP]/pronoun), nominal definiteness (indefinite/definite), and grammatical role (subject/object). This study tested whether these three linguistic markers…

In discourse processing, speakers collaborate toward a shared mental model by establishing and recruiting prominence relations between different discourse referents. In this article we investigate to what extent the possibility to infer a referent's existence from preceding context (as indicated by the referent's information status as inferred or…

This article explores the viability of the analytic distinction between "turn-constructional unit (TCU) continuation" (i.e., continuing a turn beyond a point of possible completion with grammatically dependent material) and "new TCU" (i.e., continuing a turn with grammatically independent material) when hypotactic clause combinations are involved.…

This article offers an interactional account of turn continuations in Chinese conversation, which are characterized as (a) being effected by latching/rush-through, (b) being clauses with predicates, either main or adverbial, and (c) taking a retrospective orientation in the kind of interactional work they do. Close examination reveals that while,…

Cataphoric pronouns have been characterized as being co-referential with a word that comes later. Considering that talk is produced in real time, with little benefit of knowing what is yet to come, participants understand cataphoric pro-forms to be projecting more talk. Projection is a crucial interactive resource, as it enables speakers to align…