On the Influence of Gender on Interruptions in Multiparty Dialogue

During conversations, participants do not always alternate turns smoothly. One cause of disturbance particularly prominent in multiparty dialogue is the presence of interruptions: interventions that prevent current speakers from finishing their turns. Previous work, mostly within the field of sociolinguistics, has suggested that the gender of the dialogue participants plays an important role in their interruptive behaviour. We investigate existing hypotheses in this respect by systematically analysing interruptions in a corpus of spoken multiparty meetings that include a minimum of two male and two female participants. We find a number of significant differences, including the fact that women are more often interrupted overall and that men interrupt more often women than other men, in particular using speech overlap to grab the floor. We do not find evidence for the hypothesis that women interrupt other women more frequently than they interrupt men.

[1]  R. Krauss,et al.  Dominance and accommodation in the conversational behaviours of same- and mixed-gender dyads. , 1988 .

[2]  Hiroko Furo.  Turn-taking in English and Japanese: Projectability in Grammar, Intonation, and Semantics , 2001 .

[3]  E. Schegloff,et al.  A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation , 2015 .

[4]  J. Simkins-Bullock,et al.  An investigation into the relationships between gender and language , 1991 .

[5]  S. Duncan,et al.  Some Signals and Rules for Taking Speaking Turns in Conversations , 1972 .

[6]  Mattias Heldner,et al.  Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations , 2010, J. Phonetics.

[7]  Deborah James,et al.  Women, men, and interruptions: A critical review. , 1993 .

[8]  Elizabeth Shriberg,et al.  Meeting Recorder Project: Dialog Act Labeling Guide , 2004 .

[9]  L. Smith-Lovin,et al.  INTERRUPTIONS IN GROUP DISCUSSIONS: THE EFFECTS OF GENDER AND GROUP COMPOSITION* , 1989 .

[10]  K. Dindia.  The Effects of Sex of Subject and Sex of Partner on Interruptions , 1987 .

[11]  J. D. Orcutt,et al.  Deviance, Rule‐Breaking and Male Dominance in Conversation , 1985 .

[12]  S. Garrod,et al.  Group Discussion as Interactive Dialogue or as Serial Monologue: The Influence of Group Size , 2000, Psychological science.

[13]  R. G. Williams,et al.  Disability: a model and measurement technique. , 1976, British journal of preventive & social medicine.

[14]  Mark Liberman,et al.  TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED UNDERSTANDING OF SPEECH OVERLAPS IN CONVERSATION , 2007 .

[15]  J. R. Mcmillan,et al.  Women's language: Uncertainty or interpersonal sensitivity and emotionality? , 1977 .

[16]  Li-chiung Yang.  Visualizing Spoken Discourse: Prosodic Form and Discourse Functions of Interruptions , 2001, SIGDIAL Workshop.

[17]  Elizabeth Shriberg,et al.  The ICSI Meeting Recorder Dialog Act (MRDA) Corpus , 2004, SIGDIAL Workshop.

[18]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  A Corpus-Based Study of Interruptions in Spoken Dialogue , 2012, INTERSPEECH.

[19]  Kalin Stefanov,et al.  A Data-driven Approach to Detection of Interruptions in Human-human Conversations , 2014 .

[20]  Andreas Stolcke,et al.  The ICSI Meeting Corpus , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings. (ICASSP '03)..

[21]  C. West,et al.  AGAINST OUR WILL: MALE INTERRUPTIONS OF FEMALES IN CROSS‐SEX CONVERSATION * , 1979 .

[22]  Jan-Peter de Holger N. J. Ruiter,et al.  Projecting the End of a Speaker's Turn: A Cognitive Cornerstone of Conversation , 2006 .

[23]  Carl T. Camden,et al.  A new look at interruptions , 1983 .

[24]  Judee K. Burgoon,et al.  The nature and measurement of interpersonal dominance , 1998 .

[25]  F. N. Willis,et al.  Simultaneous Talking in Conversation and Sex of Speakers , 1976 .