Swallowing in Conversation

Swallowing—a complex physical process that involves closure of the mouth and nasal cavities, as well as the glottis, and the raising and lowering of the larynx—is at the boundary between speech and the body, yet almost nothing is known about how it works in conjunction with speech in spoken interaction. Research into swallowing, mostly in speech therapy, has explored the articulations required, how long it takes the bolus to pass through the mouth to the stomach, and the sounds that occur on the way. In the phonetics literature, swallowing is regularly excluded from study: in experiments, tokens with swallowing are excluded; and while swallowing is used to set up certain experiments, its effect on speech is not the object of such studies, though it is sometimes mentioned as a possible action during a stretch of silence, as in word search. Although speaking and swallowing are mutually incompatible, in conversation, swallowing has to be coordinated around the processes of speaking. It can be part of the preparations for speech; it can also occur within and after stretches of speech. While swallowing has been marked in conversation analytic transcripts in several languages, it is almost never commented on. Like sniffing, crying or laughing, swallowing occurs in the vocal tract and may accompany speech, but is not considered as part of the stream of speech. It is clearly related to drinking, which (Hoey, 2015; Hoey, 2017; Hoey, 2020b) shows is strategically placed in the sequential unfolding of talk. In the same spirit, this paper will treat swallowing as an interactional resource which is bound up with language, and which has particular affordances and demands. This paper fills a gap in our knowledge, by focusing on swallowing that is embedded within, before, or after stretches of speech. It considers the phonetic, linguistic and interactional features of swallowing. It thus explores how verbal conduct is intertwined with one aspect of bodily conduct.

Emotion Enhances Memory for the Sequential Unfolding of a Naturalistic Experience

The events of our lives unfold across time. When remembering these events, we often reference information about when they occurred and their sequential unfolding. How does emotion affect our ability to reconstruct in memory the elements of an event in the correct temporal order? The present study explored this question using naturalistic stimuli. Human participants (N = 276) saw movie clips that varied in emotion (high versus low). Later, participants were asked to reconstruct the events in the order they encoded them. Participants’ temporal-order memory was better in the high- versus low-emotion condition. Analysis of free-recall data showed that participants remembered the high-emotion clip with greater vividness, yet the consistency of details did not differ between conditions. Our findings shed novel light on the multifaceted effects of emotion on memory, suggesting that highly emotional events can be reconstructed with greater temporal fidelity. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications.

Orientations to epistemics and deontics in treatment discussions

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. An ideological shift to patient-centered health care raises questions about how, in the face of medical authority, patients can assert agency in interactions with doctors. This study uses conversation analysis to explore how epistemic and deontic orientations are raised and made relevant in different types of responses to treatment proposals across two health care settings - New Zealand general practice consultations and Swedish hospital-based physician encounters. By examining responses ranging from acceptance to strong resistance, we show patient practices for deferring to and resisting medical authority, which includes claiming independent access to expert knowledge and raising everyday, experientially based concerns. Doctors rightfully privilege their own epistemic expertise in treatment decisions but they also take patient experiences into consideration. In cases of strong resistance we found doctors raising patients' ultimate right to refuse treatment recommendation. Our analysis further nuances current knowledge by documenting the ways epistemic and deontic domains are observably relevant forces shaping the sequential unfolding of treatment proposals.

Orientations to epistemics and deontics in treatment discussions

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. An ideological shift to patient-centered health care raises questions about how, in the face of medical authority, patients can assert agency in interactions with doctors. This study uses conversation analysis to explore how epistemic and deontic orientations are raised and made relevant in different types of responses to treatment proposals across two health care settings - New Zealand general practice consultations and Swedish hospital-based physician encounters. By examining responses ranging from acceptance to strong resistance, we show patient practices for deferring to and resisting medical authority, which includes claiming independent access to expert knowledge and raising everyday, experientially based concerns. Doctors rightfully privilege their own epistemic expertise in treatment decisions but they also take patient experiences into consideration. In cases of strong resistance we found doctors raising patients' ultimate right to refuse treatment recommendation. Our analysis further nuances current knowledge by documenting the ways epistemic and deontic domains are observably relevant forces shaping the sequential unfolding of treatment proposals.

Unmet wishes: A multimodal interaction analysis of the rejection of choice in assisted shopping interactions

In the field of health communication, it is increasingly important to understand the interactional management of free choice and the demands of (good) care, especially in situations where these two objectives conflict with each other. In a multimodal interaction analysis of video recordings, this article examines decision-making processes in which a caretaker refuses to retrieve a requested object for a woman living with acquired brain injury during their weekly shopping trip. The multimodal analysis describes both the sequential unfolding of these assisted shopping interactions and the interplay of multimodal resources used by the participants. The analysis demonstrates how choice is made available, despite communication impairments, and how the participants deal with the potential loss of face resulting from the caretaker’s rejections.

The Rise of Interactional Multimodality in Human-Computer Interaction

The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) investigates the intersection between the design of devices and users. From an early focus on interaction modeling based on psychological experiments, the field has since experienced a shift towards the study of how actual humans interact with autonomous devices. The field became conductive to ethnographic, observational and videographic studies of human-device interaction. Conversation-analytic HCI became possible. That said, this new wave of researchers was never truly able to dethrone the psychological common sense of the field. With recent developments in both the technical-sensorial capabilities and outward actuational range of embodied virtual agents, the field of HCI has once again returned to the question of the sequential unfolding of the interaction between users and intelligent agents, and the multimodal interactional repertoire that is deployed throughout. This review will highlight the situational orientation of high-impact research in the field, and relate it to the cotemporaneous development of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic frameworks. Acknowledgments. The article was prepared in the framework of a research grant funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (grant ID: 075-15-2020-908). The article was prepared in cooperation with the Sber (ex. – Sberbank’s) Gamification Lab.

RELIVING MEMORIES (OVER AND OVER AGAIN): GIFS, MOVING PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE SMARTPHONE ALBUM

This paper examines potential changes in the temporal experience of everyday digital media through the smartphone photo album. Smartphone photo albums not only organize and display domestic photographs but also initiate temporally novel photographic formats: for instance, the images taken by users can be used as raw material in the production of new kinds of ‘moving’ or ‘animated’ photographic products, usually formatted as GIF files and characterized by looped time. While the character of these products and the processes of their creation vary across operating systems, both Google’s and Apple’s systems radically disrupt the conventional assumptions of photography theory regarding photography’s relations with time. Pre-digital photography theory postulated a key distinction between a photograph and a movie or video: the photograph is static; the movie is characterized by temporal progression. In contrast, the GIF presents a shift from linear temporality to looped, cyclical time, promoting a present tense made visible not through instantaneous capture (photography) or sequential unfolding (film and video), but through continual recurrence. It eliminates the linearity of past-present-future because of its perpetual looped temporality, constituting a hybrid between photographic still and film or video. As a result, the repetitive movement of the GIF constructs a generalized impression of an event as an $2 , rather than the structured narrative of an event as a temporal unfolding. The emergence of the GIF in the smartphone album thus signals the rise of a new structure of memory and temporal experience in everyday mediated life.

Membership categorization and storytelling

In this paper, we demonstrate how the collaborative and sequential unfolding of a story ties into the constitution of a membership categorization device which we have glossed as ‘us and them’. The data come from a focus group activity where first and second generation immigrants to Denmark have been asked to discuss their situation in Denmark. Using Ethnomethodological Conversation and Membership Categorization Analysis, we present one story which involves a story-teller and his family and an elderly Danish couple living in the same block of flats. In the telling of the story, co-participants align and affiliate, and disalign and disaffiliate, at sequentially relevant junctions. We will argue that not only do such phenomena indicate listenership and possible agreement to the moral of the story in its telling, but also to the morally implicative categorical work involved in the story’s telling.

Stability and flexibility of full-length human oligodendrocytic QKI6

Objective Oligodendrocytes account for myelination in the central nervous system. During myelin compaction, key proteins are translated in the vicinity of the myelin membrane, requiring targeted mRNA transport. Quaking isoform 6 (QKI6) is a STAR domain-containing RNA transport protein, which binds a conserved motif in the 3′-UTR of certain mRNAs, affecting the translation of myelination-involved proteins. RNA binding has been earlier structurally characterized, but information about full-length QKI6 conformation is lacking. Based on known domains and structure predicitons, we expected full-length QKI6 to be flexible and carry disordered regions. Hence, we carried out biophysical and structural characterization of human QKI6. Results We expressed and purified full-length QKI6 and characterized it using mass spectrometry, light scattering, small-angle X-ray scattering, and circular dichroism spectroscopy. QKI6 was monodisperse, folded, and mostly dimeric, being oxidation-sensitive. The C-terminal tail was intrinsically disordered, as predicted. In the absence of RNA, the RNA-binding subdomain is likely to present major flexibility. In thermal stability assays, a double sequential unfolding behaviour was observed in the presence of phosphate, which may interact with the RNA-binding domain. The results confirm the flexibility and partial disorder of QKI6, which may be functionally relevant.