Entrainment as a basis for co-ordinated actions in speech

This paper investigates how rhythmicity is used to manage speaker transition in spontaneous talk, and how temporal alignment helps to achieve interactional alignment. Rhythmic Answers in Question-Answer pairs include accented syllables, in-breaths, clicks and nods, suggesting that there is ‘embodied’ rather than solely ‘linguistic’ temporal entrainment.

Interactional alignment seems to exploit temporal entrainment in the vicinity of turn boundaries in talk, like that established for musicians.