The Duration of a Turn Cannot be Used to Predict When It Ends

Abstract

Turn taking in conversation is a complex process. We still do not know how listeners are able to anticipate the end of a speaker's turn. Previous work focuses on prosodic, semantic, and non-verbal cues that a turn is coming to an end. In this paper, we look at simple measures of duration-time, word count, and syllable count-to see if we can exploit the duration of turns as a cue. We find strong evidence that these metrics are useless.