Peer-reviewed research
Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation
Tanya Stivers et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009 · DOI 10.1073/pnas.0903616106
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- A cross-linguistic study of the timing of question and answer turns in conversation in ten languages, measuring the gap between one speaker finishing and the next starting.
- How much weight it carries
- Peer-reviewed and widely cited in conversation analysis. It measures human conversation, not machines, so it is a benchmark for what voice agents are compared against, not a product measurement.
Facts taken from this source
- Stivers and colleagues report that speakers become hypersensitive to changes in the timing of responses of 100 milliseconds or less.
“Speakers become hypersensitive to perturbations in timing of responses, measured in 100 ms or less.” (Results on response timing across ten languages)
- Across ten languages, the mean gap between one speaker finishing a turn and the next speaker starting was 208 milliseconds.
“The mean response offset for the full dataset is +208 ms” (Results)