Beneath the Surface of Turn-Taking and Interruptions in Intergenerational Conversations: The Case of Adult and Adolescent Females

Conversational turns have long snatched the attention of discourse analysts. Despite this fact, and to the best of the researchers‘ knowledge, intergenerational conversations made by females have never been investigated through the lens of turn-taking and interruptions. Accordingly, this study aimed at scrutinizing the differences between female Persian-speaking adults and adolescents engaged in casual conversations in terms of turn-taking organization, and interruption patterns. To this end, the casual Persian conversations of 5 adult and 5 adolescent females attending a private reunio‎n were analyzed based upon the turn-taking model proposed by Sacks et al. (1974), along with interruption syntactic criteria introduced by West and Zimmerman (1983). The turn-taking model comprises two techniques (self-selection or selection by the next speaker) leading to gaining or allocating turns, and the interruption criteria emphasize deep intrusion of the last two or more syllables of the current speaker. The analysis of the recorded three-hour conversation revealed 1302 uses of the turn-taking techniques and 302 interruptions. The adults used approximately 86.01% of the turn-taking techniques while the counterpart group only used around 13.97%. Moreover, 93.37% of the interruptions were initiated by the adults compared with only 6.62 % initiated by the adolescents. Accordingly, the adult females were far more dominant speakers, adopted a much larger proportion of turn-taking techniques, and were considerably more inclined to use interruptions. The subsequent interview with the adolescents demonstrated that the dramatic between-group differences originated from some paralinguistic elements namely social, psychological, cultural, and power-related factors.