One intriguing feature of the human communication system is the interactional infrastructure it builds on. In both dyadic and multi-person interactions, conversation is highly structured and organized according to set principles (Sacks et al., 1974). Human adult interaction is characterized by a mechanism of exchange based on alternating (and relatively short) bursts of information. In the majority of cases, only one person tends to speak at a time and each contribution usually receives a response. What is remarkable is the precise timing of these sequential contributions, resulting in gaps between speaking turns averaging around just 200 ms (Stivers et al., 2009). From psycholinguistic experiments, we know that the time it takes to produce even simple one-word-utterances (min. 600 ms, Indefrey and Levelt, 2004) by far exceeds this average gap duration, hinting at the complexity of the cognitive processes that must be involved (Levinson, 2013).
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