Interruption (speech)
The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (June 2019) |
An interruption is a speech action when one person breaks in to interject while another person is talking. Linguists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists are among the social scientists who have studied and identified patterns of interruption that may differ by gender, social status, race/ethnicity, culture, and political orientation.
Turn-taking and overlaps
Harvey Sacks, the sociologist who launched the field of conversation analysis, worked with linguist Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in the 1970s to analyze how turn-taking was organized in speech events such as everyday conversations.[1] Speech events are organized so that only one person speaks at a time and to provide for orderly ways to change speakers. Sacks et al. thought that the process of turn-taking is subconscious.[2] Overlaps occur when two or more speakers talk simultaneously.
Types of interruptions
Communication analyst Julia A. Goldberg uses conversation analysis to define three types of conversational interruptions. Relationally neutral interruptions are interjections by the listener that seek to repair, repeat, or clarify something the speaker just said. During this type of interruption, the interrupter does not intend to exert power over the speaker, or to establish rapport with the speaker. The act of interruption itself is understood as neutral in this instance. Another type of interruption defined by Goldberg is the power interruption, where the interrupter breaks in and cuts off the speaker as a way to display some social power. Power interruptions are understood as acts of conflict and competition,[3] and are viewed as rude, hostile, disrespectful, and/or uncaring about the speaker and/or what the speaker is saying. A rapport interruption is designed to display mutuality and generally conveys the impression that the interrupter understands and empathizes with the speaker and/or the content of the speech, and is interpreted as collaborative and cooperative.[4] Power interruptions are also analyzed by Zimmerman and West, sociologists who note that the people who seek to be socially dominant exert their power over others through interrupting their speech. Zimmerman and West also analyzed how sex roles shape interruption patterns.[5]
Gender and interruption patterns
Conversely, a study by Murray and Covelli used Zimmerman and West's coding strategies on their own dataset of conversations to find that women interrupted men more often than men interrupted women.[6] According to James and Clarke, this pattern is especially evident in conversational situations where women felt more expertise, and thus may have felt that their interruptions were more legitimate.[7]
Manterrupting
The term manterrupting was coined in early 2015 by Jessica Bennett in an article that appeared in Time.[8] Bennett defines the term as "[u]nnecessary interruption of a woman by a man." During the 2016 American presidential debates, the term was applied to candidate Donald Trump, who interrupted Hillary Clinton dozens of times during the first and second debates.[9]
Status and interruption patterns
Interruptions work as a status-organizing cue.[10] In other words, conversational participants use cues such as perceptions of prestige, power, social class, gender, race and age, to organize small-group hierarchies. Interruption patterns differ by social status, with persons of higher social status, such as belonging to a social group who has more prestige or power, interrupting persons with lower status.[11] Jacobi and Schweers analyzed transcripts of oral arguments made before the U.S. Supreme Court to find that senior justices interrupted their junior colleagues more frequently than the reverse.[12] Kollock et al. studied conversations among couples, including male couples, female couples, and mixed sex couples. They found that partners who were considered to have more social power interrupted their partners more often, regardless of the gender composition of the dyad.[11] In TV shows, characters who are lower in the status hierarchy are scripted to display a "sense of defiance" that allows them to interrupt more aggressively than persons who hold a mid-level status.[13] A study of interviews between physicians and patients found that physicians, who are considered to hold higher status than their patients in terms of prestige, are much more likely to interrupt their patients, regardless of the sex of the patient or the physician. Patients interrupted senior physicians at a lower rate than they interrupted doctors who were in training, indicating that the senior physicians are regarded as having a higher status than their junior colleagues.[14] In contrast, a study of physician-patient interactions among six different statuses, from low to high, indicated that patients tended to interrupt physicians more than the reverse, and that high and low status physicians did not differ in the number of times that they interrupted their patients. This study, by Irish and Hall, noted that status thus appears to be less of an indicator of the likelihood of interruptions among physicians and patients.[15] To note, culture is influential in communication; participants of the same culture may share the same beliefs regarding how-to-act when interacting with each other. It has been noticed that thorough interaction depends on shared understanding of behavioral basis. Furthermore, cross-cultural disparity in turn-taking is potential problem in communication.[16]
Race/ethnicity and interruption patterns
Don Zimmerman and Candace West also claim in their study that whites interrupt blacks as a strategy to exert their power and dominance.[5]
Cultural differences
Interruptions, and how people interpret interruptions, differ by culture and language. Makri-Tsilpakou notes that some languages and cultures have higher tolerance for simultaneous talk, and that interpretations of interruptions may differ depending on cultural context.[17]
Political orientation
Political orientation, e.g. where a person falls on the conservative to liberal political continuum, also shapes the likelihood that people will interrupt others or will be interrupted themselves. Jacobi and Schweers, in their study of transcripts of oral arguments made before the U.S. Supreme Court, found that conservative justices and advocates interrupt more often than liberals.[12]
References
- ↑ Sacks, Harvey; Schegloff, Emanuel A.; Jefferson, Gail (1974). "A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation". Language. 50 (4): 696–735. doi:10.2307/412243. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-002C-4337-3. JSTOR 412243.
- ↑ Cantrell, Lucy. 2013-14. "The Power of Rapport: An Analysis of the Effects of Interruptions and Overlaps in Casual Conversation." Innervate 6: 74-85. Accessed 03-11-18 at https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/13-14/06-lucy-cantrell-q33103-pp-74-85.pdf
- ↑ Cf. Dorschel, Andreas, "Ins Wort fallen. Figuren der Unterbrechung." Merkur 73 (2019), no. 4, pp. 37–46 (preview)
- ↑ Goldberg, Julia A. (1990). "Interrupting the discourse on interruptions". Journal of Pragmatics. 14 (6): 883–903. doi:10.1016/0378-2166(90)90045-f.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Zimmerman, Don. H., and Candace West. 1996. "Sex Roles, Interruptions and Silences in Conversation." Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 4: 211-236.
- ↑ Murray, Stephen O.; Covelli, Lucille H. (1988). "Women and men speaking at the same time". Journal of Pragmatics. 12 (1): 103–111. doi:10.1016/0378-2166(88)90022-7.
- ↑ James, Deborah, and Sandra Clarke. 1993. Pp. 231-280 in Gender and conversational analysis. Edited by Deborah Tannen. New York: Oxford University Press.
- ↑ "How Not to Be 'Manterrupted' in Meetings". Time. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ↑ Adamczyk, Alicia (October 10, 2016). "Donald Trump's Manterruptions Continue Uninterrupted at Second Presidential Debate". Money.com. Archived from the original on May 14, 2021. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
- ↑ Farley, Sally D.; Ashcraft, Amie M.; Stasson, Mark F.; Nusbaum, Rebecca L. (2010-12-01). "Nonverbal Reactions to Conversational Interruption: A Test of Complementarity Theory and the Status/Gender Parallel". Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. 34 (4): 193–206. doi:10.1007/s10919-010-0091-0. hdl:11603/4031. ISSN 0191-5886. S2CID 146288020.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Kollock, Peter; Blumstein, Philip; Schwartz, Pepper (1985). "Sex and Power in Interaction: Conversational Privileges and Duties". American Sociological Review. 50 (1): 34–46. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.63.4385. doi:10.2307/2095338. JSTOR 2095338.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Jacobi, Tonja; Schweers, Dylan (2017-10-24). "Justice, Interrupted: The Effect of Gender, Ideology and Seniority at Supreme Court Oral Arguments". SSRN 2933016.
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<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs named:3 - ↑ Menz, Florian, and Ali Al-Roubaie. 2008. "Interruptions, status and gender in medical interviews: the harder you brake, the longer it takes." Discourse & Society 19(5): 645-666.
- ↑ Irish, J. T.; Hall, J. A. (September 1995). "Interruptive patterns in medical visits: the effects of role, status and gender". Social Science & Medicine. 41 (6): 873–881. doi:10.1016/0277-9536(94)00399-E. ISSN 0277-9536. PMID 8571159.
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs nameddoi.org - ↑ Makri-Tsilipakou, Marianthi (2015). "Interruption". The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 1–7. doi:10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi088. ISBN 9781118611463.