Schedule 77. StuTS

The presentation revolves around a study that explores how overhearers perceive interlocutors' social distance within a conversation, in which the gaps between the turns have been manipulated to be longer. It turns out that the turn-timing has an ostensible effect on how speakers are perceived in their interpersonal qualities.

Silent gaps between turns in conversation are known to be interpreted as meaningful by interlocutors. Corpus linguistic research shows that the modal gap between adjacent turns is commonly very short – roughly 200 milliseconds (Kendrick & Torreira, 2014; Levinson & Torreira, 2015; Heldner & Edlund, 2010). Conversation analysts and experimental
psycholinguists have investigated at what length a gap becomes meaningfully marked (Jefferson, 1989; Roberts et al., 2011; Henetz, 2017), finding that responses exceeding 600 ms can become socially and interactionally relevant.
The consequences of markedly long gaps manifest in how speakers are perceived interpersonally during a conversation (Roberts & Francis, 2013; Pearson et al., 2008). Building on this, the present study examines how inter-turn silence influences a specific aspect of interpersonal perception: perceived distance. Participants in our study were presented with dialogues modeled as telephone conversations, each featuring a question-response-pair in which either a request or an offer was followed by a positive response (‘yes’). We varied the length of the gap between question and response (200 ms vs. 720 ms vs. 1200 ms) and the language proficiency of the respondent (native vs. non-native).
We find a significant increase in perceived social distance as response times grow longer, showing that deviations from the standard 200 ms response time lead to inferences about speakers’ attitudes toward their interlocutors. Interestingly, the effect of gap length was not
modulated by whether respondents were native or non-native speakers, suggesting that longer processing times in non-native speakers – which lead to longer gaps at turn transitions – can increase perceived distance. We discuss how the gap effect relates to preference organization in conversation and how elongated gaps shape interpretations of the interlocutor and their turn.

Info

Day: 2025-05-15
Start time: 15:10
Duration: 00:20
Room: GWZ 1.315
Track: Pragmatics
Language: en

Links:

• iCalendar

Files

• "Why so cold and distanced?" Turn-Timing in conversation effects perceived distance of interlocutors.