Anticipation in turn-taking: mechanisms and information sources.

During conversations participants alternate smoothly between speaker and hearer roles with only brief pauses and overlaps. There are two competing types of accounts about how conversationalists accomplish this: (a) the signaling approach and (b) the anticipatory ('projection') approach. We wanted to investigate, first, the relative merits of these two accounts, and second, the relative contribution of semantic and syntactic information to the timing of next turn initiation.