There are significant cultural differences in how people have a conversation. At Huffpost on March 4, 2021 there is an article by Kelsey Borresen titled How to know if you’re an Interrupter or a ‘Cooperative Overlapper.’ Those differences are important. In a blog post on March 2, 2021 titled Which speech delivery habits do the most people find annoying? I described how interrupting was the most common annoying habit.
But back in 1984 Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor, described how some people don’t intend to interrupt. Rather, they talk along with the speaker to show they are engaged with them. Another article by Richard Nordquist at ThoughtCo. on February 6, 2019 titled Cooperative overlap in conversation also discusses this topic of turn-taking.
The tenth paragraph in Ms. Borrenson’s article links to Chapter Eight by Tannen on Turn-Taking and Intercultural Discourse in Communication in the 2012 Handbook of Intercultural Discourse. Her section about Turn-taking in Intercultural Perspective described a conversation between three New Yorkers, two Southern Californians, and a Londoner. New Yorkers expected shorter pause between turns. Tannen explains:
“In addition to expecting differing length of pauses between turns, the New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers had different assumptions and habits with regard to simultaneous speech, or overlap. The New York-bred speakers frequently talked along when another was speaking as a show of enthusiastic listenership. Because the non-New Yorkers did not use overlap in this way, they frequently mistook these ‘cooperative overlaps’ as attempts to take a turn, that is, to interrupt. Acting on this interpretation, they usually stopped speaking, so the cooperative overlap did turn into an interruption – a result that each regarded as the other’s doing.”
My image was adapted from an illustration at Wikimedia Commons taken from the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice.
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