Interruption (speech)
speech event when one person breaks in to interject while another person is talking
An interruption is a speech action when one person breaks in to interject while another person is talking. Linguists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists are among the social scientists who have studied and identified patterns of interruption that may differ by gender, social status, race/ethnicity, culture, and political orientation.
Turn-taking and overlaps
Harvey Sacks, the sociologist who launched the field of conversation analysis, worked with linguist Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in the 1970s to analyze how turn-taking was organized in speech events such as everyday conversations. Speech events are organized so that only one person speaks at a time and to provide for orderly ways to change speakers. Sacks et al. thought that the process of turn-taking is subconscious.
Overlaps occur when two or more speakers talk simultaneously.
Types of interruptions
Communication analyst Julia A. Goldberg uses conversation analysis to define three types of conversational interruptions. Relationally neutral interruptions are interjections by the listener that seek to repair, repeat, or clarify something the speaker just said. During this type of interruption, the interrupter does not intend to exert power over the speaker, or to establish rapport with the speaker.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55614571. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Interruption (speech)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.