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Part of
Language in Interaction: Studies in honor of Eve V. Clark
Edited by Inbal Arnon, Marisa Casillas, Chigusa Kurumada and Bruno Estigarribia
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 12] 2014
► pp. 101–114

Taking the floor on time

Delay and deferral in children’s turn taking

| Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

A key part of learning to speak with others is figuring out when to start talking and how to hold the floor in conversation. For young children, the challenge of planning a linguistic response can slow down their response latencies, making misunderstanding, repair, and loss of the floor more likely. Like adults, children can mitigate their delays by using fillers (e.g., uh and um) at the start of their turns. In this chapter I analyze the onset and development of fillers in five children’s spontaneous speech from ages 1;6–3;6. My findings suggest that children start using fillers by 2;0, and use them to effectively mitigate delay in making a response.

Published online: 17 July 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.12.09cas
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Clark, Eve V.
2017. Chapter 2. Becoming social and interactive with language. In Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 21], ► pp. 19 ff. DOI logo
Levinson, Stephen C. & Francisco Torreira
2015. Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Frontiers in Psychology 6 DOI logo

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