Evaluation of interruption behavior by naive encoders

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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine the characteristics of interactions that influence judgments of interruption behavior in naive observers. We selected 40 potential interruption conversation segments from television political talk shows. These segments were coded for the following 8 features a priori: floor change, rapport, transition‐relevance place (TRP), topic change, number of syllables overlap, line of regard, gender of interrupter, and gender of speaker, as well as 3 exploratory variables of overlap pile‐up, interruption acknowledgment, and moderator process‐relevant speech. The a priori features were chosen because in previous studies researchers had identified them as theoretically important in characterizing interruptions. Participants were asked to decide whether an example was indeed an interruption and then to rate it in terms of how “good” or “bad” it was as an example of an interruption, in order to extract a prototypicality judgment. Our findings suggest that a hybrid definition, combining the theoretical variables TRP, overlap (West & Zimmerman, 1977), rapport, and topic change (Goldberg, 1990), and the exploratory variables interruption acknowledgment and overlap pile‐up, best represents naive encoders’ views of interruption behavior.