The temporal structure of natural telephone conversations (directory enquiry calls)

Investigations of face-to-face conversation have suggested that visually mediated cues play an important role in regulating speaker turns. By implication, conversational structure should be disrupted in no-vision conditions. This hypothesis was tested by focusing on natural telephone conversations. A total corpus of over 700 direct enquiry calls was examined, with detailed study of 18 of these conversations, which were subjected to temporal analysis. Results of