In this talk, we will give an overview of some of our results, both old and new, about respiratory and phonatory turn-taking cues. Both of these aspects of turn coordination are rarely addressed in literature, which focuses primarily on its articulatory and prosodic characteristics.

In the respiratory part of the presentation, we will discuss a new categorisation of turn-taking events which combines the criterion of speaker change with whether the original speaker inhales be- fore producing the next talkspurt. We will demonstrate that the latter criterion could be potentially used as a proxy for pragmatic completeness of the previous utterance (and, by extension, of the inter- ruptive character of the incoming speech). Specifically, respiratory properties of silences accompanied by speaker change in which the original speaker continues talking without breathing in are similar to those in within-speaker, turn-holding silences. We will also present evidence that the likelihood of speaker change is higher during pauses accompanied by a respiratory hold, suggesting that breath holds are used in reaction to incoming talk rather than as a turn-holding cue. In addition to analysing dimensions which are routinely omitted in studies of interactional functions of breathing (exhalations, presence of overlapping speech, breath holds), we will analyse patterns of breath holds in silent breath- ing and show that breath holds are sometimes produced towards the beginning (and towards the top) of silent exhalations, potentially indicating an abandoned intention to take the turn. We claim that the breathing signal can thus be successfully used for uncovering hidden turn-taking events, which are otherwise obscured by silence-based representations of interaction.

Moving up from the lungs to the larynx, in the second part of the talk we will focus on our ongoing work on voice quality variation in spontaneous interactions, a topic which has received little attention so far, not least because of the technical difficulties associated with recording phonation in continuous speech. In order to circumvent these problems, we are using miniature accelerometers attached to the skin of the tracheal wall below the glottis (“throat microphones”). Tue method, which has been used for some time in ambulatory postoperative voice monitoring, provides a good approximation of the voice source without the need for glottal inverse-filtering. We will demonstrate that the accelerometer signal can be successfully used to differentiate between voice qualities in isolated vowels while being unaffected by vocal tract resonances, fo and speaker variation. We will also present some preliminary result comparing several voice quality measures in speech intervals preceding silences accompanied by speaker change or followed by more speech from the same person. We demonstrate that utterances ending in speaker changes are characterised by lower periodicity and higher rates of creaky voice. Tue findings are thus consistent with the “trailing-off” character of these silences, as suggested in literature.