Research seminar: Margaret Zellers, Stockholm University

Abstract

In conversation, participants must manage not only the linguistic structure of what is said, but also the developing organization of the interaction itself. They must attend to and interpret their interlocutor’s behavior to anticipate whether a speaker will continue, whether a response or signal of engagement is expected, or whether the floor is open for a new speaker to take up a turn. Despite endless variability in content, conversations exhibit orderly patterns that are observable across contexts, while also reflecting individual differences and cultural or linguistic conventions.

In this talk, I will present a series of studies demonstrating different aspects of how conversationalists use multiple cues to anticipate others’ behavior and maintain smooth interaction. For example, interactants can collaborate on prosodic focus constructions and use them to pivot the topic of the conversation (Zellers & Ogden, 2014). They can use variation in prosodic and segmental features to predict the upcoming end of their interlocutor’s turn (Zellers, 2017; Feindt et al. 2023). And they integrate visual cues such as hand gestures with prosodic signaling in order to effectively communicate their turn-taking intentions, sometimes in language-specific ways (Zellers et al., 2019; Zellers et al., 2025). These findings highlight the multimodal and collaborative nature of conversational organization, showing how participants integrate prosodic and visual cues to maintain the flow of interaction.

Feindt, K., Rossi, M., Esfandiari-Baiat, G., Ekström, A.G., & Zellers, M. (2023) Cues to next-speaker projection in conversational Swedish: Evidence from reaction times. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2023, 1040-1044, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2023-778

Zellers, M. (2017) Prosodic variation and segmental reduction and their roles in cuing turn transition in Swedish. Language and Speech 60(3): 454 – 478. doi: 10.1177/002383091665868

Zellers, M., Gorisch, J., & House, D. (2025) Temporal relationships between speech and hand gestures in the vicinity of potential turn boundaries in German and Swedish conversation. Language and Cognition, 17, e57. doi: 10.1017/langcog.2025.10014

Zellers, M., Gorisch, J., House, D., & Peters, B. (2019) Hand gestures and pitch contours and their distribution at possible speaker change locations: a first investigation. In Proceedings of GeSpIn 2019, 93-98.

Zellers, M. & Ogden, R. (2014) Exploring interactional features with prosodic patterns. Language and Speech 57(3): 285-309. doi: 10.1177/0023830913504568

On Margaret Zellers