Investigating the Influence of Stance-Taking on Conversational Timing of Task-Oriented Speech

Sara Ng, Gina-Anne Levow, Mari Ostendorf, Richard A. Wright

Abstract: In task-oriented conversations, speakers express their thoughts and attitudes about task objectives through the act of stance-taking. Previous work has shown that stance-taking influences prosodic behaviors such as pitch, intensity, and utterance duration. However, less is known about how stance-taking affects the negotiation of turn-taking behaviors in dyadic conversation. In this work, we analyze the relationship between speaker stance and conversational timing in Pacific Northwest English. We show that there are statistically significant differences in the duration of speech units, intra-speaker pauses and inter-speaker floor transfers when speech contains stance-taking behaviors. Our findings suggest that in addition to other known sources of variation in the timing of turn-taking behaviors, speaker stance measurably influences the time course of conversation.