15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Durational Aspects in Turn Taking

Karl Weilhammer, Susen Rabold

University of Munich, Germany

On the basis of headset microphone multichannel dialogue recordings we show that pause and overlap durations are Gaussian distributed, when projected on a logarithmic scale. This implicitly challenges Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's principle: "Minimize gap and Overlap". We compare turn taking patterns of the languages German, American English and Japanese and calculate time constants that might be relevant for the design of automatic dialogue management systems.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Weilhammer, Karl / Rabold, Susen (2003): "Durational aspects in turn taking", In ICPhS-15, 2145-2148.