All exchanges are created equal: A reconsideration of conversational timing analysis

Conversations can be studied in many different ways (e.g., content, organization); within the hearing sciences, researchers often focus on quantifying the structure of conversations acoustically, specifically in terms of turn-taking. Beginning with Norwine and Murphy, the primary metric for quantifying turn-taking has been the floor-transfer offset (FTO), which assumes that the gaps between talker turns and the overlaps between talkers lie on a single temporal dimension. There are, though, several theoretical and practical concerns with the assumed temporal unidimensionality of FTOs and their analyses. Using turn-taking data from a series of free conversations conducted with varying background sounds and numbers of interlocutors, we demonstrate the multidimensionality of FTOs; that gaps and overlaps represent separate behaviors with differing relation to other conversational metrics. The current practice of solely reporting the central tendencies of FTOs can oversimplify and potentially water down the conversational benefits that different behaviors and/or technologies may provide. Considering that each datum in the distributions of gaps and overlaps represents an event in a conversation, and that each would bear meaning to the interlocutors, we propose more nuanced analyses of conversational dynamics. [Work supported by funding from the Medical Research Council, Grant No. MR/X003620/1.]