The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600 ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking, such as its timing, are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages – with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals – do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This Research Topic contributes to advancing our understanding of these problems by summarizing recent work from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialog and conversation analysis, linguists, phoneticians, and comparative ethologists.

Language Processing questions what happens when we process language - what mental operations occur during processing and how they are organised over time. The last decade has seen real advances in the study of language processing that have wide ranging implications for human cognition in general. Language Processing gives an account of these developments both as they relate to experimental studies of processing and as they relate to computational modelling of the processes. In addition to chapters covering core topics, such as lexical processing, syntactic parsing and the comprehension of discourse, special topics of recent interest are also included.

Prosody in English, German and Chinese is outlined as a principal component of linguistic form for communicative functions in speech interaction.

In Relationship Thinking, N. J. Enfield outlines a framework for analyzing social interaction and its linguistic, cultural, and cognitive underpinnings by focusing on human relationships. This is a naturalistic approach to human sociality, grounded in the systematic study of real-time data from social interaction in everyday life. Many of the illustrative examples and analyses in the book are a result of the author's long-term field work in Laos. Enfield promotes an interdisciplinary approach to studying language, culture, and mind, building on simple but powerful semiotic principles and concentrating on three points of conceptual focus. The first is human agency: the combination of flexibility and accountability, which defines our possibilities for social action and relationships, and which makes the fission and fusion of social units possible. The second is enchrony: the timescale of conversation in which our social relationships are primarily enacted. The third is human sociality: a range of human propensities for social interaction and enduring social relations, grounded in collective commitment to shared norms. Enfield's approach cuts through common dichotomies such as 'cognitive' versus 'behaviorist', or 'public' versus 'private', arguing instead that these are indispensable sides of single phenomena. The result is a set of conceptual tools for analyzing real-time social interaction and linking it with enduring relationships and their social contexts. The book shows that even - or perhaps especially - the most mundane social interactions yield rich insights into language, culture, and mind.

Mammalian vocal duets and turn-taking exchanges — long, coordinated acoustic signals exchanged between two individuals— are primarily found in family-living, pair-bonded mammals with a socially monogamous lifestyle (some rodents, some lemurs, tarsiers, titi monkeys, a Mentawai langur, gibbons and siamangs). Duetting and turn-taking patterns combine visual, chemical, tactile and auditory cues to produce some of the most exuberant displays in the realm of animal communication. How and why such phenotypes evolved independently across main lineages are fundamental questions at the core of the nature-nurture debate. Duetting styles ranging from antiphonal (non-overlapping) to simultaneous (overlapping) emissions have now been documented in various taxa, some of which are quite reminiscent of turn-taking rules in human conversation. Nonetheless, much remains to be learned about this complex motor skill, and at all four levels of analysis, namely (1) developmental processes, (2) causal mechanisms (3) functional properties and (4) evolutionary history. Given the strong link between this form of coordinated singing and pair-bonding, gaining a deeper understanding of this kind of cooperative behavior will likely shed more light on the deep evolutionary roots of human culture, language and music.

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we 'repair' and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anthropology, communication, linguistics and sociology to explore how speakers address problems in their own talk and that of others, and how the practices of repair are interwoven with non-verbal aspects of communication such as gaze and gesture, across a variety of languages. Specific chapters highlight intersections between repair and epistemics, repair and turn construction, and repair and action formation. Aimed at researchers and students in sociolinguistics, speech communication, conversation analysis and the broader human and social sciences to which they contribute - anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology - this book provides a state-of-the-art review of conversational repair, while charting new directions for future study.

In Speaking, Willem "Pim" Levelt, Director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, accomplishes the formidable task of covering the entire process of speech production, from constraints on conversational appropriateness to articulation and self-monitoring of speech. Speaking is unique in its balanced coverage of all major aspects of the production of speech, in the completeness of its treatment of the entire speech process, and in its strategy of exemplifying rather than formalizing theoretical issues.