Silences in conversations: awkward or do we need them?

Available for over a year

For conversations to work we need to take turns to speak and it's something we learn when we're very young and then hone as time goes on. But there are also moments where no one is speaking and it's those lapses in conversation which might give us a clue as to how all this turn-taking takes place with precise millisecond timing. Claudia Hammond speaks to Elliot Hoey, from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. First broadcast on All in the Mind, 22 June 2016.