Women's place in everyday talk: Reflections on parent-child interaction.

In this paper, we compare the results of our previous study of interruptions in same-sex and cross-sex conversations (Zimmerman and West, 1975) with similar data from parent-child verbal interaction and find that there are striking similarities between the pattern of interruptions in male-female interchanges and those observed in the adult-child transactions. We use the occasion of this comparison to consider several possible interactional consequences of interruption in conversation, particularly as these consequences relate to the issue of dominance in face-to-face interaction.