Speaker transitions in conversation are often brief, with minimal
vocal overlap. Signed languages appear to defy this pattern
with frequent, long spans of simultaneous signing. But recent
evidence suggests that turn boundaries in signed language
may only include the content-bearing parts of the turn (from
the first stroke to the last), and not all turn-related movement
(from first preparation to final retraction). We tested whether
signers were able to anticipate “stroke-to-stroke” turn boundaries
with only minimal conversational context. We found that,
indeed, signers anticipated turn boundaries at the ends of turnfinal
strokes. Signers often responded early, especially when
the turn was long or contained multiple possible end points.
Early responses for long turns were especially apparent for
interrogatives—long interrogative turns showed much greater
anticipation compared to short ones.
