EVALUATION OF INTERRUPTION BEHAVIOR BY NAIVE ENCODERS

The purpose of this study was to determine the characteristics of inte ractions that influence judgments of interruption behavior in naive ob servers. We selected 40 potential interruption conversation segments f rom television political talk shows. These segments were coded for the following 8 features a priori: floor change, rapport, transition-rele vance place (TRP), topic change, number of syllables overlap, line of regard, gender of interrupter, and gender of speaker, as well as 3 exp loratory variables of overlap pile-up, interruption acknowledgment, an d moderator process-relevant speech. The a priori features were chosen because in previous studies researchers had identified them as theore tically important in characterizing interruptions. Participants were a sked 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 v ariables TRP, overlap (West & Zimmerman, 1977), rapport, and topic cha nge (Goldberg, 1990), and the exploratory variables interruption ackno wledgment and overlap pile-up, best represents naive encoders' views o f interruption behavior.