We examine turn-taking in collaborative dyadic conversations in which one player described the position of a target object with respect to other fi xed objects on her laptop screen, while the other tried to move his representation of the target object to the same position on his own screen. We concentrate on two issues: the role of fi lled pauses (FPs) such as /um/ or /uh/ in the system of turn-taking, and the strategies for establishing dominance in the dialogues. A quantitative analysis of FP use supports the descriptive observations in the literature that fi lled pauses mostly function as pre-starts, fl oor-holders, and to some extent also as fl oor-yielders. Turn-taking behavior quantifi ed with turnlatencies and the distribution of turn-types also varies with the gender of the interlocutors and the role they perform in the communicative task, and may signal dominance in the conversations
