Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality

On the Predictability of Action

Cheikhna Amar — 2024-07-10

Gaze has been shown to be an important resource in both mundane and institutional interaction for next speaker selection and for displaying availability and willingness to be selected. In institutional interactions, participants' actions can be predictable due to factors such as how actions are projected, how participants are categorized, and the structure of the activity. This predictability enables participants to anticipate what will happen next, which can be seen through their actions before this anticipated next action actually occurs. Focusing on teacher-student interaction in two distinct EFL educational settings, this paper examines how students employ gaze shifts to anticipate and predict teacher's selection of the next speaker. The analysis displays how, in institutional interaction, the current state of the activity can make a next action, such as turn allocation, more or less predictable, allowing for participants to anticipate the next action and to act accordingly. The ability to anticipate the teacher’s next action in a local context in which this action is predictable is part of students’ classroom interactional competence. In addition, the data show that students' gaze shifts toward the teacher signal willingness to participate, while shifts away indicate resistance. The study highlights how participants navigate learning activities by anticipating and shaping actions, with gaze serving as a crucial interactional resource.

Sustained Pointing Gestures in Instructions and Questions

Mojenn Schubert — 2024-04-04

Gestures can be brief and compact in their execution, but also elaborate and extended. One way to utilise this kinetic flexibility is to extend one’s gesture in time by holding it in its stroke position. This study explores the interactional function of gestural holds by investigating pointing gestures that are sustained beyond a sequence-initiating turn and into the responsive space following it. The study draws on video data from naturally occurring conversations in German and focuses on held pointing gestures after instructions and questions. It is shown that in both action environments, participants delay gestural closure to indicate that they still consider the addressee’s response to be insufficient.

Halt for Speaking

Hansun Zhang Waring — 2024-03-12

Conversation analytic (CA) research on multimodality has mostly focused on the “movement” rather than the “freezing” of such movement, except for a small body of work on gesture holds mostly in sign language and several European languages. Based on two large corpora of video-recorded family interactions and adult ESL classroom interactions in American English, this conversation analytic study demonstrates how halts of eating and drinking are carefully configured to preserve contiguity by facilitating completion and repair. Findings expand our understanding of the interdependence between multimodality and sequence organization within the larger context of managing multiactivity and materiality.

Geomorphopoetic Vocalisations

Stina Ericsson — 2024-06-03

Vocalisations – that is, sounds such as oh! or aaah – are highly versatile, obtaining their interactional meaning from the local environment. This study adds to previous research on vocalisations by showing how participants in video clips of mountain-bike crashes interpret the materiality of the ground in meaningful ways using such sounds. The vocalisations are called geomorphopoetic because they imitate the shape of the ground during movement. Three groups of geomorphopoetic vocalisations are identified: (1) sounds that inhabit the evenness and elongation of the ground, (2) sounds that inhabit the smallness of the ground, and (3) sounds that inhabit repeated movements supported by the properties of the ground.