A Conversation-Analytic Annotation of Turn-Taking Behavior in Japanese Multi-Party Conversation and its Preliminary Analysis

Tokyo University of TechnologyChiba UniversityNational Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistic

Conversation across cultures

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Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields

Shifting embodied participation in multiparty university student meetings

PhD ThesisStudent group work has been used in higher education as an effective means to cultivate students’ work-related skills and cooperative learning. These encounters of small groups are the sites where, through talk and other resources, university students get their educational tasks done as well as acquire essential workplace skills such as problem-solving, team working, decision-making and leadership. However, settings of educational talk-as-work, such as student group meetings, remain under-researched (Stokoe, Benwell, & Attenborough, 2013). The present study therefore attempts to bridge this gap by investigating the professional and academic abilities of university students to participate in multiparty group meetings, drawing upon a dataset of video- and audio-recorded meetings from the Newcastle University Corpus of Academic English (NUCASE). The dataset consists of ten hours of meetings in which a group of naval architecture undergraduate students work cooperatively on their final year project – to design and build a wind turbine. The study applies the methodological approach of conversation analysis (CA) with a multimodal perspective. It presents a fine-detailed, sequential multimodal analysis of a collection of cases of speaker transitions, and reveals how meeting participants display speakership and recipiency with their verbal/vocal and bodily-visual coordination. In this respect, the present study is the first to offer a systematic collection, as well as a thorough investigation, of speaker transition and turn-taking practices from a multimodal perspective, especially with the scope of analysis beyond pre-turn and turn-beginning positions. It shows how speaker transitions through ‘current speaker selects next’ and ‘next speaker self-selects’ are joint-undertakings not only between the self-selecting/current speaker, and the target recipient/addressed next speaker, but also among other co-present participants. Especially, by mobilising the whole set of multimodal resources, participants are able to display their multiple orientations toward their co-participants, project, pursue and accomplish multiple courses of action in concurrence, and intricately coordinate their mutual orientation toward the shifting and emerging participation framework during the transition, establishment and maintenance of the speakership and recipiency. By presenting the data and analysis, this study extends ii boundaries of existing understandings on the temporality, sequentiality and systematicity of multimodal resources in talk-and-bodies-in-interaction. The thesis also contributes to interaction research in the particular context of student group work in higher education contexts, by providing a ‘screenshot’ of students’ academic lives as it unfolds ‘in flight’. Particularly, it reveals how students competently participate in multiparty group meetings (e.g., taking and allocating turns), co-construct the unfolding meeting procedures (e.g., roundtable update discussion), and jointly achieve the local interactional goals (e.g., sharing work progress, reaching an agreement). Acquiring such skills is, as it argues above, not only crucial for accomplishing the educational tasks, but also necessary for preparing university students to fulfill their future workplace expectations. The study therefore further informs the practices of university students and professional practitioners in multiparty meetings, and also draws on methodological implications for multimodal CA research

Complaint sequences across proficiency levels: the contribution of pragmatics and multimodality

El objetivo de esta tesis es contribuir a la investigación en pragmática del interlenguaje y multimodalidad. El objetivo principal es explorar como aprendices de lengua en distintos niveles de lengua realizan quejas desde la perspectiva del análisis de la conversación (Kasper, 2006). Un análisis multimodal de la conversación se ha realizado para examinar cómo diferentes modos interactúan en la construcción de la conversación. El marco teórico presentado en el estudio se centró en la naturaleza de la pragmática (Crystal, 1985; Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983), pragmática del interlenguaje (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993), análisis de la conversación (Sacks et al., 1974), nivel de lengua (e.g. Al-Gahtani & Roever, 2012), el acto de habla de las quejas (e.g. Trosborg, 1995; Laforest, 2002), y la multimodalidad (Jewitt, et al., 2016).The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the research on interlanguage pragmatics and multimodality. The main purpose is to explore how learners at different proficiency levels perform complaints and responses to complaints following a conversation analysis approach (Kasper, 2006). Furthermore, a multimodal conversation analysis is conducted in order to examine how different modes interact in the construction of the conversation. To meet the objectives of the thesis, the theoretical framework presented in the study focused on the nature of pragmatics (Crystal, 1985; Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983), interlanguage pragmatics (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993), conversation analysis (Sacks et al., 1974), proficiency (e.g. Al-Gahtani & Roever, 2012), the speech act of complaints (e.g. Trosborg, 1995; Laforest, 2002), and multimodality (Jewitt, et al., 2016). This framework served to explore participants' performance of complaints sequences at different proficiency levels, specific conversational features such as backchannel and overlapping, paralanguage and kinesics