56 | Language and Interaction:
The type and amount of interruption in the conversation of Indonesian husbands and wives
Roger and Nesshoever 1987. Looking for the dominant party in a conversation via
analysing interruption has pitfalls in that the context in which the interruptions are used
must be taken into account James and Clarke 1993.
For example, “Don’t touch that, it’s hot
” may be judged a successful interruption but is not necessarily indicative of the overall
dominance of the interrupter.
c. Interruptions and Gender
There are many studies that report significant differences between same-sex and cross-sex
conversations where
interruptions were
measured. These studies reported that men more frequently interrupt women than vice
versa. In one of the first reports of such observations, Zimmerman and West 1975
found that men dominated and controlled conversations between men and women using
recordings of conversations held in public places. There were ten same sex pairs of each
gender and eleven cross sex pairs. The type of conversations varied broadly from couples
confessing intimacies to each other to greetings between acquaintances. Analysis of
their data showed that men interrupted women more often than women interrupted men.
Despite this criticism, Zimmerman and West have many supporters. Pillon 1982 in Pillon
N o n n y B a s a l a m a
| 57 et al., 1992 reports that males tend to interrupt
their partner more often than females who also show more unsuccessful attempts to interrupt.
Rosenblum 1986:160 cited in James and Clarke 1993 states that men are more likely
to interrupt and overlap womens speech than the reverse. Similar results have also been
found by researchers; West 1975, Esposito 1979, West Zimmerman 1983, Petterson
1986. De Franscisco 1998, in his study of men and women’s conversational behaviour in
marital relations, found that men display a high proportion of violation of no-response
and also of interruptions.
However there are also many studies against saying that there are no significant differences
of number and type of interruption in same-sex and cross-sex interruption studies. James and
Clark 1993 pointed out, evidence indicating that the finding that men interrupt women
more than women interrupt men is not true because the majority of studies dealing with
gender and the use of interruptions reveal that this is not the case”. Beattie 1982:859 argued
against Zimmerman and Wests findings by saying that their samples are small and
unrepresentative, and hence represent a weakness of the data. Also their interpretation
is too narrow. Beattie 1981 in his study of
