<p>Taking turns to respond to each other is a key part of conversation and babies learn the technique at around six months of age, long before infants know much about language, says a new study.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The speed of response white taking turns - about 200 milliseconds on average, about the same time as it takes to blink -- is astonishing when we appreciate the slow nature of language encoding: it takes 600ms or more to prepare a word for delivery, the study said.<br /><br />This implies a substantial overlap between listening to the current speaker and preparing our own response.<br /><br />In human infants, turn-taking is found in the 'proto-conversations' with caretakers.<br />These infant-caretaker interactions are initially adult-like in terms of how fast infants can respond. <br /><br />But as they develop into more sophisticated communicators, infants' turn-taking abilities slow down, likely due to both learning more and more complex linguistic structures, and having to find a way to squeeze these into short turns, said researcher Stephen Levinson from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.<br /><br />Levinson reviewed new research on turn-taking, focusing on its implications for how languages are structured and for how language and communication evolved.<br /><br />He pointed out that turn-taking is common not only across unrelated cultures and language, the patter is also exhibited in all the major branches of the primate family - partly innate and partly learned in some monkeys, just as with human infants. <br /><br />Even our nearest cousins the great apes take alternating turns in gestural communication, despite having a less complex vocal channel.<br /><br />All of this suggests that humans may have inherited a primate turn-taking system, Levinson said.<br /><br />This may have started out as a gestural form of communication, as with the other great apes, then later (about one million years ago) became one primarily expressed through the vocal channel, the study noted.<br /><br />The findings appeared in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.</p>
<p>Taking turns to respond to each other is a key part of conversation and babies learn the technique at around six months of age, long before infants know much about language, says a new study.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The speed of response white taking turns - about 200 milliseconds on average, about the same time as it takes to blink -- is astonishing when we appreciate the slow nature of language encoding: it takes 600ms or more to prepare a word for delivery, the study said.<br /><br />This implies a substantial overlap between listening to the current speaker and preparing our own response.<br /><br />In human infants, turn-taking is found in the 'proto-conversations' with caretakers.<br />These infant-caretaker interactions are initially adult-like in terms of how fast infants can respond. <br /><br />But as they develop into more sophisticated communicators, infants' turn-taking abilities slow down, likely due to both learning more and more complex linguistic structures, and having to find a way to squeeze these into short turns, said researcher Stephen Levinson from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.<br /><br />Levinson reviewed new research on turn-taking, focusing on its implications for how languages are structured and for how language and communication evolved.<br /><br />He pointed out that turn-taking is common not only across unrelated cultures and language, the patter is also exhibited in all the major branches of the primate family - partly innate and partly learned in some monkeys, just as with human infants. <br /><br />Even our nearest cousins the great apes take alternating turns in gestural communication, despite having a less complex vocal channel.<br /><br />All of this suggests that humans may have inherited a primate turn-taking system, Levinson said.<br /><br />This may have started out as a gestural form of communication, as with the other great apes, then later (about one million years ago) became one primarily expressed through the vocal channel, the study noted.<br /><br />The findings appeared in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.</p>