29.4361, Diss: Discourse Analysis; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics: Katherine Hilton: ''What Does an Interruption Sound Like?''

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4361. Wed Nov 07 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4361, Diss: Discourse Analysis; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics: Katherine Hilton: ''What Does an Interruption Sound Like?''

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Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2018 10:53:00
From: Katherine Hilton [khilton at stanford.edu]
Subject: What Does an Interruption Sound Like?

 
Institution: Stanford University 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2018 

Author: Katherine Hilton

Dissertation Title: What Does an Interruption Sound Like? 

Dissertation URL:  https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/12742076

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis
                     Phonetics
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Sociolinguistics


Dissertation Director(s):
Penelope Eckert
Robert Podesva

Dissertation Abstract:

Taking turns is fundamental to conversation. When people participate in a
conversation, they alternate between moments of speaking and not speaking, and
generally, only one person at a time claims the role of speaker. It has long
been argued that attempting to avoid moments where two or more people speak at
the same time is a universal norm for conversation with both cognitive and
social motivations. Despite this, moments of simultaneous, overlapping speech
are relatively common in everyday conversation and can occur without
diminishing comprehensibility or violating social norms. This has provoked a
great deal of research which asks: When is it acceptable for more than one
person to speak at the same time, and when is it disruptive? In other words,
when does overlapping speech constitute an interruption? I argue that the
answer to this question is inherently subjective and influenced by a person's
own conversational style. Moreover, because conversation participants take
turns carrying out actions which extend beyond the scope of a single speaking
turn—such as telling a story or solving a problem—I argue that speakers can
interrupt by disrupting the completion of such an action, even when they do
not speak at the same time as another person. This dissertation uses a
large-scale social perception experiment to analyze how listeners come to the
interpretation that an interruption has occurred in conversation. I find that
listeners perceived speakers to be interrupting when they overlapped with
their interlocutors for an extended period of time while also using louder
voice and faster speaking rate. However, these perceptions varied depending on
the listeners' own conversational styles and were more heavily influenced by
the pragmatic relations between speaking turns than even the degree of overlap
between turns. Based on these findings, I argue that, rather than being an
objectively measurable property of the speech signal, interruptions are
subjective and context-dependent interpretations about who has the right to
speak at a particular moment in time about a particular topic.




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