Human turn-taking development: A multi-faceted review of turn-taking comprehension and production in the first years of life

Human communication builds on a highly cooperative and interactional infrastructure – conversational turn-taking. Turn-taking is characterized by reciprocal, alternating exchanges between two or more interactants, avoidance of overlap, and relatively short response times. Although the behavioral principles governing turn-taking in spoken interactions of human adults have been investigated for decades, relatively little is known about the acquisition of conversational turn-taking skills and the developmental trajectories of turn-taking comprehension and production. The aim of the present review was to provide a comprehensive overview of turn-taking development enabling the extrapolation of developmental milestones and linkage to a recently developed comparative framework. This multi-faceted review will serve as a crucial guide to our current understanding of turn-taking in childhood. It may instigate a better understanding of turn-taking phylogeny, its evolutionary roots, as well as systematic, quantitative applications across and between species, thereby possibly bridging the existing gap between linguistic and non-linguistic species.