Editorial: Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

One intriguing feature of the human communication system is the interactional infrastructure it builds on. In both dyadic and multi-person interactions, conversation is highly structured and organized according to set principles (Sacks et al., 1974). Human adult interaction is characterized by a mechanism of exchange based on alternating (and relatively short) bursts of information. In the majority of cases, only one person tends to speak at a time and each contribution usually receives a response. What is remarkable is the precise timing of these sequential contributions, resulting in gaps between speaking turns averaging around just 200 ms (Stivers et al., 2009). From psycholinguistic experiments, we know that the time it takes to produce even simple one-word-utterances (min. 600 ms, Indefrey and Levelt, 2004) by far exceeds this average gap duration, hinting at the complexity of the cognitive processes that must be involved (Levinson, 2013). While the behavioral principles governing turn-taking in interaction have been researched for some decades—primarily by scholars of conversation analysis—the cognitive underpinnings of the human turn-taking system have long remained elusive. Recently, psycholinguists have begun to explore the cognitive and neural processes that allow us to deal effectively with the immensely complex task of taking turns on time. Amongst other things, this has highlighted the anticipatory, predictive processes that must be at work, as well as the different layers of processing allowing production planning and comprehension to take place simultaneously (de Ruiter et al., 2006; Magyari and de Ruiter; Bögels et al., 2015). These insights mesh well with the conversation analytic literature that has illuminated the interactional environments in which individual turns are embedded: their sequential organization and the use of conventionalized linguistic constructions allow for the projection of upcoming talk, as well as for the recognition of points of possible completions in the turn which make transition to the next speaker relevant (Sacks et al. Topic bring together these as yet largely independent lines of research to elucidate our understanding of turn-taking from multiple perspectives and aim to foster future synergies. In addition to exploring the adult psycholinguistic machinery and its workings, researchers have begun to wonder how and when the required cognitive and social processes mature in children, as well as how they compare to those in other species. Levinson (2006) proposed that human beings are inherently social and interactive in orientation. He argues that an " interaction engine " may lie at the heart …