Individual variation in F0 marking of turn-taking in natural conversation in German and Swedish

Abstract

The linguistic mechanisms organizing turn-taking in conversation are still not fully understood. Especially disputed is the relevance of various linguistic features to signal the disposition to yield the floor. The present study adds to this discussion by examining the role of prosody for turn-taking in two different languages, German and Swedish. F0 movement is measured at three points—offset (P1), 200ms (P2) and 500ms (P3)—before the turn end, and normalized. Sentence type (declarative, ques-tion), type of speaker change (change, keep, backchannel) and transition (gap, no-gap-no-overlap, overlap) were also annotated, among other features. Preliminary results show that German uses a much wider span of F0 values compared to Swedish. Since F0 has a lexical-phonological function (i.e.pitch accent) in Swedish, the potential prosodic structure is restricted. On the other hand, the flexibility of German manifests itself in extreme F0 movements and an accommodation of F0 between interlocu-tors. Although there is evidence for accommodation of F0 in German, this is not as strongly demonstrated in the Swedish data. As our F0 normalization should exclude a physiological explanation, we argue for an explanation based on entrainment.