I think the Atlantic article conveyed the wrong conclusion. The full text of the article is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587.full http://www.pnas.

I think the Atlantic article conveyed the wrong conclusion. The full text of the article is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587.full http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587.full The abstract has their conclusions: "Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations." The research article claims that all languages have this gap, and that within a culture, the gap is quite consistent. Across cultures and languages, however, the gap has a decent spread, as you observed. In the discussion, the research article authors say, "Amid a strong universal pattern, we do see measurable cultural differences. However, the range that we show, mean offset of next turn in each language departing no more than a quarter-second from the overall mean, is not of the kind that would imply fundamentally different types of turn-taking systems in the different languages, as the cultural variability hypothesis would suggest." Honestly, I'm still trying to reason through how their data and conclusions line up, but their conclusions are more subtle than what the Atlantic article explains. (Which is not surprising to me.) edit: Looking at the distribution graphs, it is true that these means are close compared to the tails of the distributions: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587/F1.large.jpg http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10587/F1.large.jpg