Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
and speaker exchange is finely coordinated so that one person speaks at a time and turn-taking occurs
smoothly with minimal gaps or overlaps. Given the fact that even those problems which do arise in
coordination usually occur around TRPs, it is clear that timing is a major accomplishment of
conversationalists. Precision timing, of course, also requires a high degree of skilled listenership and as
Sacks et al. (1978:43) point out, the turn-taking system with all its various turn-allocational techniques:
builds in an intrinsic motivation for listening to all utterances in a conversation,
independent of other possible motivations such as interest and politeness. In the variety
of techniques for arriving at a next speaker, and in their ordered character, it obliges any
willing or potentially intending speaker to listen to, and analyse, each utterance across
its delivery.
Listeners need to monitor the conversation in case they are selected by the current speaker, and potential
speakers need to be alert to upcoming TRPs if they are to intervene successfully. For instance, the second
option, that of self-selection, requires a high degree of conversational competence on the part of the
listener, particularly in multi-party settings. This is because the 'pressure rule' (see Downes 1984:254)
comes into play here, leading to competition between potential speakers over who gets the next turn. As
alluded to above, the first person to speak has exclusive rights to the turn and others who have started are
obliged to stop. The speaker-continues option further increases this sense of urgency for potential speakers
as any delay may result in the current speaker resuming his or her turn.
While it is clear from the above that the achievement of precision timing in turn transfer requires an
ability to predict an up-coming TRP, we need to examine the basis upon which this prediction is made.
Robert Hopper (1992:104-106) considered three candidate indicators of transition relevance (utterance
syntax, terminal pitch contour, and pauses) and placed more weight on the first, because it not only allows
participants to identify transition relevance as it occurs, but also makes it possible for listeners to project
unit completion slightly in advance of its occurrence. While he found evidence that terminal pitch cues
were of some use, he concluded that speakers did not 'reliably distinguish transition relevance on this cue
alone' (Hopper 1992: 105). They were not an aid to the prevention of overlap, nor did they make it less
likely that the current speaker would continue. Similarly pauses are not reliable indicators of turn
completion because a large number of pauses are not transition relevant and most turn exchanges are
'pauseless' (Hopper 1992:106). However, he showed that speakers classify pauses in terms of transition
relevance and points out that long pauses during telephone conversations are treated by participants as
problematic and may lead them into ‘speakership’ (Hopper 1992:106). The fact that turn transfer may also
be facilitated through the employment of nonverbal signals highlights one of the possible advantages of
analysing data drawn from telephone rather than face-to-face interaction. As Robert Hopper (1992:103)
rightly pointed out, telephone conversation is the ideal site for the investigation of the turn taking
mechanism 'because its constraints simplify the next-speaker's problem: there are only two speakers in a
vocal-only system' (the potential methodological benefits of analyzing the telephone talk of people who
stammer are discussed in more detail below).
Stammering and turn-taking: some initial considerations
It should be clear from the preceding discussion that there are a number of fundamental issues which
need to be addressed concerning the relationship between stammering and the turn management system. A
conversation analytic focus may help us to distinguish between the various forms and features of
stammering in more meaningful ways. For instance, silent blocks are likely to have very different
interactional consequences than repetitions. The 'pressure rule' referred to earlier will inevitably create
serious problems for those who, because of their speech impediment, can be regarded as 'slow conversation
starters'. In this respect, those whose speech dysfluency consists predominantly of silent blocks are more
likely to experience difficulty in securing their turn than those whose stammering episodes are more
audible. This is particularly true in telephone interaction where non-verbal signs of struggle are not
available to the other participant. Therefore an examination of the role of silence in the turn-taking system
and the implications of this for those categorized as people who stammer may help to develop our
understanding of the various characteristics of stammering and to refine the analytic distinction between
silent and vocal dysfluencies.
One of the most important observations that can be made with regard to silence in conversation is that
not all instances of this phenomenon are treated identically. Indeed it is the relationship of a silence to the
turn-taking structure that is important, and this determines whether it will be classified as a gap, pause or
lapse (see Sacks et al. 1978:27). A gap refers to a silence that may occur between the end of one speaker's
turn and some listener self-selecting for the next turn. This gap is 'usually brief, often about one second or
less' (Nofsinger 1991:94). A lapse, on the other hand, occurs when none of the turn-taking techniques
described above are employed and the conversation comes to a halt. The third category of silence identified
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