This time, Tony starts talking at a point in Marsha’s turn where she is clearly not finished – she has not completed her turn in terms of its grammar, intonation (there is no full stop) or action (she has not finished her speculation about her son’s circumstances). Tony interrupts Marsha. But, as Kitzinger points out, Tony’s interruption is cooperative:In response to Marsha’s enquiry about when their son boarded a plane, Tony reports not being sure and then gives an approximate answer (‘around three o’clock or something of that sort’). At line 05 Marsha is apparently using this report as the basis for some speculation about what may have happened and it is this speculation, based on his (as it turns out erroneous) report, that Tony interrupts. Tony’s new partner, Gerda, who has overheard his report of Joey’s departure time, has apparently corrected him and he is relaying this correction (‘four o’clock’) to Marsha before she can develop a theory about Joey’s flight based on incorrect information. The interruption is here used to implement a correction that has consequences for the turn Marsha is in the course of producing, and it is thus clearly a cooperative action, and from Marsha’s point of view, a helpful interruption.All of this shows us that simply counting instances of overlapping talk says very little about interruption.Other claims about gender differences in talk have also later been revealed to be flawed. A common assertion is that women talk more than men. The words that characterise the way women talk perpetuate this myth – women chatter, gossip, prattle, natter – about trivial matters. At the same time, feminist researchers have claimed to find that men talk more than women, hogging the floor in public and workplace settings. Yet more scientists have found that no gender difference exists in who talks more.Throughout my book Talk: The Science of Conversation, there are hundreds of examples of men, women, salespersons, mediators, police officers, clients, customers . . . using tag questions (e.g., ‘don’t you’), ‘minimal responses’ (e.g., ‘mm’, ‘yeah’), initiating topics, and overlapping each other. If we categorise all of our examples in terms of gender alone, we will make erroneous claims about women and men at the same time as we miss what is going on in each case. We will stop looking for other explanations for the way people talk.