From a turn-takingperspective, simultaneous speech in conversation can be an aberration according to the one-speaker-at-a-time norm or a legitimate form of nondisruptive talk according to the all-together-now view. A coding system was devised that identified unambiguous instances of both of these types of simultaneous speech and tested whether the relative distribution of these two types of simultaneous speech varies according to the characteristics of conversation (Experiments 1 and 2) and whether the content of the two types of simultaneous speech differs (Experiment 3). The results from Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed that there are two distinct types of simultaneous speech coexisting in the same conversation and showed that changes in participant familiarity (but not topic orientation) were significantly related to variations in the relative distribution of the two types of simultaneous speech. The results of Experiment 3 showed that the content of the two types of simultaneous speech differs along a supportive (all-together-now simultaneous speech) and unsupportive (one-at-a-time simultaneous speech) dimension.
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