Human turn-taking development: A multi-faceted review of turn-taking comprehension and production in the first years of life

TL;DR

This review explores how children learn to take turns in conversation and how this skill develops in early life.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of turn-taking development and its evolutionary and cross-species implications.

Findings

Turn-taking involves reciprocal exchanges and short response times.

Little is known about how children acquire turn-taking skills.

The review aims to bridge gaps between linguistic and nonlinguistic species.

Abstract

Human communication builds on a highly cooperative and interactional infrastructure—conversational turn-taking. Turn-taking is characterized by reciprocal, alternating exchanges between two or more interactants, avoidance of overlap, and relatively short response times. Although the behavioral principles governing turn-taking in spoken interactions of human adults have been investigated for decades, relatively little is known about the acquisition of conversational turn-taking skills and the developmental trajectories of turn-taking comprehension and production. The aim of the present review was to provide a comprehensive overview of turn-taking development enabling the extrapolation of developmental milestones and investigations across species and taxa. it thus aims to serve as a crucial guide to our current understanding of turn-taking in childhood and instigate a better understanding of turn-taking phylogeny, its evolutionary roots, as well as systematic, quantitative applications across and between species, thereby possibly bridging the existing gap between linguistic and nonlinguistic species.

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