Who Do You Think Will Speak Next? Perception of Turn-Taking Cues in Slovak and Argentine Spanish

We investigate perceptual cues in human-human dialogue management related to signalling the change of speaker and the interlocutor’s wish to backchannel or contribute with propositional content. We are interested primarily in the relevance of prosodic cues in relation to textual ones, and their cross-linguistic validity by comparing unrelated languages Slovak and Argentine Spanish. Results of a perception study indicate that 1) in addition to textual cues, prosodic cues also play a clear role in perceiving how the dialogue will unfold; and 2) there exists a non-empty intersection of temporal and intonational prosodic turn-taking cues in the two languages, despite their belonging to separate families.