Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener's own conversational style as well as gender. We all know that unpleasant feeling when we're talking about something interesting and halfway through our sentence we're interup - "Wait, what's for dinner?" - pted. Stanford scholar Katherine Hilton surveyed 5,000 American English speakers to better understand what affects people's perceptions of conversational interruptions (Image credit: L.A. Cicero) But was that really an interruption? Whether or not one person interrupted another depends on whom you ask, according to new research from Stanford's Katherine Hilton, a doctoral candidate in linguistics. "What people perceive as an interruption varies systematically across different speakers and speech acts," said Hilton, who is also a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. "Listeners' own conversational styles influence whether they interpret simultaneous, overlapping talk as interruptive or cooperative. We all have different opinions about how a good conversation is supposed to go." Using a set of carefully controlled scripted audio clips , Hilton surveyed 5,000 American English speakers to better understand what affects people's perceptions of interruptions. She had participants listen to audio clips and then answer questions about whether the speakers seemed to be friendly and engaged, listening to one another, or trying to interrupt.