[1] Speech events are organized so that only one person speaks at a time and to provide for orderly ways to change speakers.
Relationally neutral interruptions are interjections by the listener that seek to repair, repeat, or clarify something the speaker just said.
[6][7] Since the late-1970s, social scientists have studied the effect gender has on interruption patterns and other components of verbal communication.
[4] Linguist Makri-Tsilipakou discovered that men and women use "simultaneous speech" at about the same rate, but the sexes differ as to their interpretation of the meaning of the interruption.
[12] The term manterrupting was coined in early 2015 by Jessica Bennett in an article that appeared in Time.
[15] In other words, conversational participants use cues such as perceptions of prestige, power, social class, gender, race and age, to organize small-group hierarchies.
[16] Jacobi and Schweers analyzed transcripts of oral arguments made before the U.S. Supreme Court to find that senior justices interrupted their junior colleagues more frequently than the reverse.
[18] In contrast, a study of physician-patient interactions among six different statuses, from low to high, indicated that patients tended to interrupt physicians more than the reverse, and that high and low status physicians did not differ in the number of times that they interrupted their patients.
This study, by Irish and Hall, noted that status thus appears to be less of an indicator of the likelihood of interruptions among physicians and patients.
[6] Don Zimmerman and Candace West also claim in their study that whites interrupt blacks as a strategy to exert their power and dominance.
Jacobi and Schweers, in their study of transcripts of oral arguments made before the U.S. Supreme Court, found that conservative justices and advocates interrupt more often than liberals.