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…

In many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful…

"Interactional competence" is a theoretical construct that has only recently been tested empirically. Speakers contribute to an interaction with their individual resources; however, interactional competence is co-constructed by all participants. Interactional competence can be observed in spoken interaction as speakers' combined ability…

This study determines the fine-grained bottom-up linguistic features involved in successful second language (L2) English academic group oral tutorial discussion through the use of a spoken learner corpus composed of more than 20 hrs of L2 production. Student performances were graded by teacher-raters using a can-do rating scale, which assessed…

Grammar in natural interaction is an emergent, dynamic and adaptive system that is consistently subject to change. It is understood as a collection of open multiple subsystems, each of which is activated as the language users recurrently participate in a particular linguistic, interactional and social activity. When a certain linguistic form or…

From a conversation analytic perspective, this dissertation investigates how talk-in-turns in conversation are constructed and organized in a way that minimizes gaps and overlaps between speakers. Based on an informed assumption that turns are built out of turn units that allow the projection of their possible end points, I first characterize…

The relationship of one aspect of conversational style, the degree of directness in the sending and interpretation of messages, to ethnicity was investigated in a comparison of the communication styles of Greeks and Americans. It was hypothesized that Greeks tend to be more indirect in speech than Americans, and that English speakers of Greek…

A study analyzed four dyadic conversations for evidence of the signals operating in the turn-taking process and facilitating the smooth exchange of turns. It found over 20 syntactic, prosodic, and semantic features occurring frequently with turn-taking. The five most significant factors correlating with turn-taking were a prosodically completed…

The collection of essays on phonetics and phonology, entirely in French, includes: "Le calcul de la frequence intrinseque. Necessite du rapport a une ligne de reference" (calculation of intrinsic frequency; necessity of a line of reference) (Conrad Ouellon); "Caracteristiques microprosodiques de duree et d'intensite en lecture et en…