Interactions Between Turn-taking Gaps, Disfluencies and Social Obligation

Speakers strive to minimize inter-turn gaps when engaged in a dialogue. However, little work has addressed what impact this might have on the fluency of the following speech. In this paper we explore whether there are interactions between turn-taking gaps and turn-initial disfluencies and if the social pressure to respond to questions plays a role in that interaction. Our results indicate that child speakers are more likely to become disfluent both after a question and as the gap length increases, and that the two interact to further increase the likelihood. We also compared the speech of children with Typical Development (TD) to those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), where we found that those with ASD were less likely to become disfluent after a question. This finding suggests that the trade-off between timing and disfluencies is driven by social obligation, and that speakers are willing to tolerate disfluencies so as to maintain a short delay.