Judgments Concerning the Valence of Inter-Turn Silence Across Speakers of American English, Italian, and Japanese

Abstract

The fact that people with minimal linguistic skill can manage in unfamiliar or reduced linguistic environments suggests that there are universal mechanisms of meaning construction that operate at a level well beyond the particular structure or semantics of any one language. The authors examine this possibility in the domain of discourse by focusing on how gaps arising at the juncture between 2 persons' turns-at-talk (inter-turn silences) are evaluated by speakers of typologically distinct languages: English, Italian, and Japanese. This cross-linguistic design allows the testing of both universal and relative aspects in orientation to silence. For this study, the effects of inter-turn silence are tested using study participants' ratings of speakers' willingness to comply with requests or agree with assessments that were embedded in conversations. In a 3 × 2 × 3 between-groups design, 3 silence lengths (0 ms, 600 ms, or 1200 ms) were crossed with 2 speech act types (requests and assessments) in manipulations of telephone conversations that were modeled on an actual telephone call between friends. Native-speaking study participants, in their home countries, provided ratings on Likert-type scales. Ratings significantly decreased within each language group at longer inter-turn silences, indicating a generalized response to the gaps; however, means were also significantly different between groups, indicating different expectations for agreement.

Notes

¹Our aim should not be confused with an analysis of the “meaning” of silence. Silence itself is featureless (Levinson, 1983), taking on shades of meaning only in the context of social interaction.

²We capitalize Conversation Analyst to represent those scholars working within a particular tradition that is rooted in phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology. Heritage (1984) explicates these intellectual roots and connections (see also Maynard & Clayman, 1991).

³Although there is an important distinction in the literature between social and structural understandings of preference, these are not mutually exclusive conceptions. Indeed, they may be related under a broader understanding of affiliation or social solidarity. (On the distinctions between, and relations among, these 2 conceptions of preference, see Heritage, 1984; Lerner, 1996; Levinson, 1983.)

⁴We tested this using an analysis of covariance model with all levels of silence length and speech act as within-subjects variables, language group as a between-subject variable, and gender and age as covariates.

⁵Because Italian and English are, theoretically, comparable on syllable units, we calculated speech rates, post hoc, for the English and Italian speakers in our stimuli. They were remarkably similar: 319 syllables per minute and 336 syllables per minute, respectively (using a measure of speaking rate, not articulation rate.) Although we cannot compare this to a Japanese rate of speech measure, we can say that the same semantic content was produced by that speaker in roughly the same amount of time as the Italian rate of speech (7.35 s and 6.22 s, respectively.) Ultimately, however, this analysis is vacuous because the Americans only used 4.8 s to produce the same stretch of talk, yet their rate of speech is the same as the Italians. Thus, from various vantage points, speech rate is a problematic comparison.