Fundamental frequency height as a resource for the management of overlap in talk-in-interaction.

Overlapping talk is common in talk-in-interaction. Much of the previous research on this topic agrees that speaker overlaps can be either turn competitive or noncompetitive. An investigation of the differences in prosodic design between these two classes of overlaps can offer insight into how speakers use and orient to prosody as a resource for turn competition. In this paper, we investigate the role of fundamental frequency (F-0) as a resource for turn competition in overlapping speech. Our methodological approach combines detailed conversation analysis of overlap instances with acoustic measurements of F-0 in the overlapping sequence and in its local context. The analyses are based on a collection of overlap instances drawn from the ICSI Meeting corpus. We found that overlappers mark an overlapping incoming as competitive by raising F-0 above their norm for turn beginnings, and retaining this higher F-0 until the point of overlap resolution. Overlappees may respond to these competitive incomings by returning competition, in which case they raise their F-0 too. Our results thus provide instrumental support for earlier claims made on impressionistic evidence, namely that participants in talk-in-interaction systematically manipulate F-0 height when competing for the turn.