This post on Eye Tracking Update mentions some recent research on how people in groups signal each other to negotiate whose turn it is to speak. The cues people use to signal conversational turn-taking are subtle: eye contact, a tilt of the head, a slight change in pitch. Many people use these signals automatically, without any conscious awareness of how they’re being received. Even when an individual’s signals are extended to everyone in a group, those reading the signals may not perceive them in the same ways, since people have different speech styles (based on gender, ethnicity, whether they have issues like asperger’s/autism or social phobia, the area they’re from, past and current peer groups, and on and on).
People with more power in a group situation, especially, tend to have more influence on the conversational rhythm. Perhaps managers who consciously try to use turn-taking signals inclusively and who pay attention to how they’re being read can do a better job of creating settings in which a diverse group of people feels welcome to provide input. Even though turn-taking signals are subtle, their effects are strong. Most of us have a pretty clear sense of when we might be interrupting or when someone else is interrupting, even if we’re not aware of the signals that underlie that sense.
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*Paper the post refers to is here (pdf).
They have some stuff in there about human-machine interfaces too. Which reminds me… it’s sort of weird how often I’ve ended up thinking about turn-taking signals while doing various group assignments and interviews this semester: Like, when you’re used to interviewing people in person, how do you manage the flow of an audio-only interview? What happens when one person in a group interview sits at the end of the conference table where the interviewers can’t make eye contact with that person? Why is it that in some groups a particular subset of people do most of the talking? Etc.