Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Date

2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Roger Kreuz

Committee Member

Eugene Buder

Committee Member

Gina Caucci

Abstract

Conversational exchanges are frequently marked by overlap. Some forms include backchanneling and both unsuccessful and successful attempts to take the floor. To further understand their role in discourse, 81 half-hour virtual conversations between strangers from the CANDOR corpus (Reece et al., 2023) were analyzed for instances of successful interruptions, whereby one member of a dyad takes the floor away from the other. Nearly six hundred such episodes were identified and analyzed for underlying systematicity. Regarding demographic characteristics of the speakers, gender was not related to successful interruptions. However, older speakers were more likely to successfully interrupt, suggesting that a speaker’s age affects whether a floor exchange occurs. Successful interruptions did not become more similar over the course of a conversation. Additionally, both the number of times a speaker performed a successful interruption and the number of times they were successfully interrupted did not influence their enjoyment of the conversation.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest/Clarivate.

Notes

Open Access

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