Impact of age and gender on frequency of interruption in dyadic interviews

Abstract

This paper investigates whether the gender and/or age of interviewees in dyadic interviews influences frequency of speech interruption of young female interviewers. Forty female students at King Faisal University (KFU) and forty interviewees participated in the study. The author compared the number of interruptions per ten minutes of conversation made by interviewees belonging to four categories: young females, young males, older females, and older males. The author hypothesized that older male interviewees interrupt young female interviewers more than younger male and female interviewees. Additionally, the author hypothesized that older female interviewees interrupt young female interviewers more than young female interviewees. The results did not support the hypothesis that males interrupt females more often. Female participants made significantly more interruptions than male participants. The data do not support the hypothesis that older interviewees interrupt their interviewers more frequently than younger interviewees.

The Effect of Familiarity on Conversation Turns in Dyadic Conversation Among Chinese Older Adults

“…A total of 60 dyadic conversation sessions were conducted, including 30 mutually familiar-older-adult sessions (FOAS) and 30 mutually unfamiliar-older-adult sessions (UOAS). Boles and Bombard (1998) emphasized that a 10-minute conversation sample usually provides an adequate representation of dyadic conversation, and this conversation sample length has been used in several studies (e.g., Almoaily, 2020; Hadley et al, 2021; Hall et al, 2018; Mackenzie, 2000; Sluis et al, 2019; Stickle & Wanner, 2019). Conversational topics were chosen by the interlocutors and no structured scripts were provided to make the dyadic conversation as natural as possible (Söderlund et al, 2016).…”

Multimodal Irregular Self-Selection in Chinese Postgraduate English as a Foreign Language Learners’ Conversation: When, How, and Why

“…In contrast to it, peer interaction involves students who have equal identity status and similar knowledge status. In such a context, there is a tendency of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to implement self-selection in an irregular turntaking way, that is, irregular self-selection (Almoaily, 2020). However, by referring to the previous literature, relatively little is known about this action in EFL learners' conversation from the perspective of multimodal interaction.…”