TURN-TAKING STRATEGIES IN COOPERATIVE TASK DIALOGUE
TURN-TAKING STRATEGIES IN COOPERATIVE TASK DIALOGUE

Summary/Abstract: We examine turn-taking in collaborative dyadic conversations in which one player described the position of a target object with respect to other fixed objects on her laptop screen, while the other tried to move his representation of the target object to the same position on his own screen. We concentrate on two issues: the role of filled pauses (FPs) such as /um/ or /uh/ in the system of turn-taking, and the strategies for establishing dominance in the dialogues. A quantitative analysis of FP use supports the descriptive observations in the literature that filled pauses mostly function as pre-starts, floor-holders, and to some extent also as floor-yielders. Turn-taking behavior quantifi ed with turnlatencies and the distribution of turn-types also varies with the gender of the interlocutors and the role they perform in the communicative task, and may signal dominance in the conversations.

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