Sequence organization and timing of bonobo mother-infant interactions

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Rossano
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Pan Paniscus ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Analytic Framework ◽  
Communicative Behavior ◽  
Sequence Organization ◽  
Sequential Organization ◽  
Communicative Actions ◽  
Participation Frameworks

In recent years, some scholars have claimed that humans are unique in their capacity and motivation to engage in cooperative communication and extensive, fast-paced social interactions. While research on gestural communication in great apes has offered important findings concerning the gestural repertoires of different species, very little is known about the sequential organization of primates’ communicative behavior during interactions. Drawing on a conversation analytic framework, this paper addresses this gap by investigating the sequential organization of bonobo mother-infant interactions, and more specifically, how individuals solicit carries from one another. It shows how bonobos establish participation frameworks before producing a carry request gesture and how the ensuing communicative actions can be organized in adjacency-pair sequences. Moreover, the timing between the initiation of an action and its response is similar to what has been documented in adult human interaction. Finally, it outlines some of the orderly practices bonobos use to deal with the absence of response from the addressed participants in carry sequences. Keywords: adjacency pair; pan paniscus; conversation analysis; gestures; interactional time; sequence organization

Situating embodied action plans: pre-enacting and planning actions within knowledge communication in sports training

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (s4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajit Singh
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Action Plans ◽  
Prosodic Features ◽  
Sports Training ◽  
Communicative Actions ◽  
Embodied Action ◽  
Micro Analysis ◽  
Knowledge Communication

Abstract This article investigates action plans not as mental but as situated and observable activities in social interactions. I argue that projections and action plans can be understood as complex embodied practices through which actors prepare and coordinate further actions as part of a trajectory of a “communicative project”. “Projections” within ‘talk-in-interaction’ are a central topic of conversation analysis (CA), e.g. for the micro analysis of the organization of turn-taking or for the identification of turn-constructional units. Aside from former CA-studies on syntactic and prosodic features, current research using CA from a multimodal perspective shows how embodied resources, such as gestures, serve as “premonitory components” of communicative actions. Using video data of communications in sports training in trampolining, I will show how communicatively situated “embodied action plans” are applied within pre-enactments and instructions for the production of embodied knowledge. Pre-enactments not only serve the production of an ideal imagination to corporally produce intersubjectivity. Pre-enactments are also used temporally for the multimodal and visibly situating of embodied action plans, to which actors can coordinate and orientate their current and prospective communicative actions.

Source marking in represented talk and thought in Vietnamese narratives

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanh thi Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Sequential Organization ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Participation Frameworks ◽  
Vietnamese Speakers

AbstractThis paper uses conversation analysis to examine when Vietnamese speakers explicitly mark the source of represented talk or thought (RT) and when they may omit the RTs source in narratives in dyadic and multiparty family conversations. In Vietnamese, a pro-drop, non-inflectional language, RTs may be introduced by a verb of speaking and its subject, a verb of speaking without the subject, or no verb of speaking and no subject. The analysis focuses on how these three choices are employed in the sequential organization of narrative series, narrative participation frameworks, and narrative dramatization. The findings contribute to current understandings about source marking through linguistic devices as an interactional practice in conversations in addition to other resources such as voicing and embodied actions.

On the sequential organization and genre-orientation of discourse units in interaction: An analytic framework

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uta Quasthoff ◽  
Vivien Heller ◽  
Miriam Morek
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Analytic Framework ◽  
Structural Requirements ◽  
Sequential Organization ◽  
Analytical Potential ◽  
Global Organization ◽  
Descriptive Approach ◽  
Discourse Units

The article deals with larger stretches of talk-in-interaction and argues in favor of a descriptive approach, which integrates the structural requirements of global organization, the special type of sequential orderliness within larger units as well as the genre-orientation of these units. Drawing on previous work in conversation analysis, discourse analysis and the sociological genre analysis, the article introduces GLOBE as an analytical tool which functionally links discourse units to conventionalized communicative purposes. GLOBE reconstructs the interactive achievement of genre-oriented discourse units in a three-branch analysis of jobs, devices and forms. The analytical potential of GLOBE is demonstrated in the exemplary genre-contrastive analysis of a narrative, an explanative and an argumentative excerpt. On the basis of the analyses of the three genres, the overarching constitution of genre-oriented global units is then explicated.

scholarly journals Transcribing silent actions: a multimodal approach of sequence organization

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenza Mondada
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Significant Advance ◽  
Multimodal Approach ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Sequence Organization ◽  
Sequential Organization

This paper deals with a significant advance the use of video and the study of multimodality within conversation analysis have made possible: the possibility to analyse in detail the sequentiality of actions that are achieved by other resources than talk, and more precisely a diversity of embodied practices. A close attention to how we transcribe these silent embodied actions enables us to better understand their specific temporal unfolding, spatial arrangements, and sequential organization. The paper starts discussing silent second actions (responses to requests); then moves to silent first actions (requests achieved by handing over objects); and finally discusses embodied sequences fully realized in silence. The proposed transcript notation enables reflection upon the complex emergent and sequentially unfolding temporality of multimodally formatted actions. Taking into account the details of embodied conduct, it discusses the consequences for the principled notions of temporality, sequentiality and multimodality.

scholarly journals Human agency beliefs influence behaviour during virtual social interactions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Caruana ◽  
Dean Spirou ◽  
Jon Brock
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Eye Contact ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
Agency Beliefs ◽  
The Impact

In recent years, with the emergence of relatively inexpensive and accessible virtual reality technologies, it is now possible to deliver compelling and realistic simulations of human-to-human interaction. Neuroimaging studies have shown that, when participants believe they are interacting via a virtual interface with another human agent, they show different patterns of brain activity compared to when they know that their virtual partner is computer-controlled. The suggestion is that users adopt an “intentional stance” by attributing mental states to their virtual partner. However, it remains unclear how beliefs in the agency of a virtual partner influence participants’ behaviour and subjective experience of the interaction. We investigated this issue in the context of a cooperative “joint attention” game in which participants interacted via an eye tracker with a virtual onscreen partner, directing each other’s eye gaze to different screen locations. Half of the participants were correctly informed that their partner was controlled by a computer algorithm (“Computer” condition). The other half were misled into believing that the virtual character was controlled by a second participant in another room (“Human” condition). Those in the “Human” condition were slower to make eye contact with their partner and more likely to try and guide their partner before they had established mutual eye contact than participants in the “Computer” condition. They also responded more rapidly when their partner was guiding them, although the same effect was also found for a control condition in which they responded to an arrow cue. Results confirm the influence of human agency beliefs on behaviour in this virtual social interaction context. They further suggest that researchers and developers attempting to simulate social interactions should consider the impact of agency beliefs on user experience in other social contexts, and their effect on the achievement of the application’s goals.

Which epistemics? Whose conversation analysis?

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Analytic Framework ◽  
Context Specificity ◽  
Standard Methods ◽  
Discourse Studies ◽  
Action Sequencing ◽  
Basic Features ◽  
The Relationship

In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies (2016) titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, contributing authors criticize Heritage’s research on participants’ orientations to, and management of, the distribution of (rights to) knowledge in conversation. These authors claim (a) that the analytic framework Heritage (and I) developed for analyzing epistemic phenomena privileges the analysts’ over the participants’ point of view, and (b) rejects standard methods of conversation analysis (CA); (c) that (a) and (b) are adopted in developing and defending the use of abstract analytic schemata that offer little purchase on either the specific actions speakers accomplish or the understanding others display of them; and (d) that, by virtue of these deficiencies, claims about the systematic relevance of epistemic phenomena for talk-in-interaction breach long-standing norms regarding the relationship between data analysis and generalizing claims. Using a collection of excerpts bearing on the import of epistemics for action formation and action sequencing, I demonstrate that these claims are patently false and suggest that they reflect the authors’ effort to recast CA as a kind of fundamentalist enterprise. I then consider excerpts from a second collection (of occasions involving the pursuit of one party’s ‘suspicions’ about another’s alleged misdeeds) to illustrate how the form of social organization described by Heritage can be used to explicate other phenomena that depend on systematic alterations to its basic features. In conclusion, I suggest that CA’s success in enhancing our grasp of the organization of talk-in-interaction derives from its unique commitment to both generalization and context specificity, collections and single cases, findings plus a continual openness to the ‘something more’ that each particular case can provide.

L1-L2 speaker interaction in a study abroad setting

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail McMeekin
Keyword(s):  
Study Abroad ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Communication Strategies ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Host Family ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Sequential Organization ◽  
Construct Meaning

Abstract Analyzing approximately nine hours of video-recorded naturally-occurring conversations over eight weeks of study abroad between three L2 speakers of Japanese and their L1 speaker host family members, the present study uses conversation analysis to explore how the participants manage intersubjectivity using communication strategies in word searches. Specifically the study explores the following: (a) how participants deploy, manipulate, and respond to communication strategies as interactional resources used to co-construct meaning and progressively disambiguate the referent sought; (b) how strategies are used within the sequential organization of word searches to guide the trajectory of the search on a turn-by-turn basis; (c) how linguistic and non-linguistic resources such as intonation and eye gaze are used in conjunction with strategies to organize participant structure and relevant action in the unfolding talk; and (d) how a microanalytic, interactional approach can redefine our understanding of how strategic mechanisms are used and labeled in interaction.

Storytelling in multiple contexts

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.K. Luke
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multiple Contexts ◽  
Sequential Organization ◽  
Single Instance ◽  
The Many ◽  
Favourite Topic

Since Sacks’ pioneering work in the 1970s, storytelling has become a favourite topic of research within conversation analysis. Scholars have examined storytelling from the point of view of sequential organization (Jefferson 1978), participation organization (Goodwin 1984), story co-telling (Duranti 1986, Mandelbaum 1987, Lerner 1992), displays of epistemic statuses (Schegloff 1988), and action formation (M. Goodwin 1982, 1990; Mandelbaum 1993; Beach 2000; Beach & Glenn 2011; Wu 2011, 2012). Work has also been done on the management of storytelling in the context of other, concurrent activities (Goodwin 1984, Goodwin & Goodwin 1992, Mandelbaum 2010, Haddington et al. 2014). The aim of this paper is to apply the many insights that researchers have accumulated since Sacks to the analysis and understanding of a single instance of storytelling in a Cantonese conversation. A detailed, step-by-step unpacking of this story will reveal how the contingencies of an interaction, including the interplay of multiple contexts, may leave fine-grained imprints on the shape and character of a story.

Conversation Analysis

2020 ◽  
pp. 764-779
Author(s):  
Maren Rüsch
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Natural Speech ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Sequence Organization ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Linguistic Approaches ◽  
Insight Into

Conversation analysis, which began to evolve in the 1960s, studies the structure of talk, and how speakers organize a mostly fluent talk without many gaps or overlaps in order to guarantee maximal mutual understanding. It is based on the analysis of natural speech in a culturally natural environment. In this chapter, basic concepts of conversation analysis as well as the methods used by scholars are explained. A collection of examples from several African languages illustrates terminologies such as turn-taking strategies, sequence organization, and repair of trouble-sources in talk and provides an insight into new linguistic approaches to conversation analysis, especially in African settings.

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