Can Overhearers Predict Who Will Speak Next?

One theory of turn-taking in dialogue is that the current speaker controls when the other conversant can speak, which is also the basis of most spoken dialogue systems. A second theory is that the two conversants negotiate who will speak next. In this paper, we testthese theories by examining how well an overhearer can predict this,based only on the current speaker's utterance, which is what the other conversant would have access to. We had overhearers listen to the current speaker and indicate whether they felt the current speaker will continue or not. Our results support the negotiative model.