Gibson2010
| Gibson2010 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Gibson2010 |
| Author(s) | David R. Gibson |
| Title | Marking the turn: obligation, engagement, and alienation in group discussions |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Turn-taking, Topic |
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| Year | 2010 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Social Psychology Quarterly |
| Volume | 73 |
| Number | 2 |
| Pages | 132–151 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1177/0190272510371456 |
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Abstract
In group conversations, not speaking is the state of affairs experienced by most people most of the time; I refer to this as ‘‘conversational latency.’’ Hypothesizing that conversational latency affects one’s discursive options, I analyze the association between latency (operationalized as the number of turns that elapsed since the current speaker last spoke) and turn-initial words (e.g., but, oh) in twenty-nine experimental task groups, taking turn-initial words as indicators of the type of content a speaker proposes to produce. The findings suggest a model of group conversation in which conversational obligations weigh heaviest on the shoulders of the most recent contributors; those who contributed somewhat less recently remain engaged but have more latitude to take discordant positions; and those who have been quiet for longer periods are susceptible to ‘‘alienation from topic,’’ as a result of which reentry is often accompanied by an attempt to change the topic.
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