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The search for origins of human linguistic behavior is a consuming project in many fields. Philosophers drawing on studies of animal behavior are working to revise some of the standard cognitive requirements in hopes of linking the origins of human language to non-human animal communication. This work depends on updates to Grice's theory of communicative intention and Millikan's teleosemantics. Yet the classic idea of speaker meaning on which these new projects rest presupposes coherent, stable, individual, internal, and prior intention as a cognitive or mental state, which is also the framework presupposed in theory of mind. This framework neglects the co-authored nature of communicative intentions and is thereby at odds with enactivist views of cognition. In this paper we draw on the idea of participatory sense-making alongside research on non-human animal communication to identify utterances—co-authored meaningful acts—as the token of communicative activity cross-species. Utterances by our definition are expressive, relational, and work without mindreading. In closing we propose the possibility of dialogical subjectivity, and engage with animal studies to show that some species exhibit its traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the factors influencing turn-taking coordination in virtual reality (VR) environments, with a focus on identifying key interaction dynamics that affect the ease of gaining speaking opportunities. By analyzing VR interaction data through logistic regression and clustering, we identify significant variables impacting turn-taking success and categorize typical interaction states that present unique coordination challenges. The findings reveal that features related to interaction proactivity, individual status, and communication quality significantly impact turn-taking outcomes. Furthermore, clustering analysis identifies five primary interaction contexts: high competition, intense interaction, prolonged single turn, high-status role, and low activity, each with unique turn-taking coordination requirements. This work provides insights into enhancing turn-taking support systems in VR, emphasizing contextually adaptive feedback to reduce speaking overlap and turn-taking failures, thereby improving overall interaction flow in immersive environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In psychotherapy, verbal communication is central to the therapeutic process. However, when patients remain silent, it can serve various functions, such as reflecting more deeply or hesitating to elaborate on a topic. This article uses conversation analysis to examine a specific context in which silence occurs: After a patient has concluded his/her narrative, both the therapist and the patient resist the turn allocation by the respective other, resulting in mutual silence. The results indicate that both therapists and patients collaboratively generate this silence. Therapists typically end the silence with an intervention, addressing an aspect of the topic and treating the pause as intra-topic silence. The study is based on approximately 29 h of video recordings of German-speaking outpatient psychodynamic psychotherapy sessions. This research highlights the importance of therapists recognizing the different forms of silence that may emerge during psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effects of noise and hearing impairment on conversational dynamics between pairs of young normal-hearing and older hearing-impaired interlocutors. Twelve pairs of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired individuals completed a spot-the-difference task in quiet and in three levels of multitalker babble. To achieve the rapid response timing of turn taking that has been observed in normal conversations, people must simultaneously comprehend incoming speech, plan a response, and predict when their partners will end their turn. In difficult conditions, we hypothesized that the timing of turn taking by both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired interlocutors would be delayed and more variable. We found that the timing of turn starts by talkers with hearing impairment had higher variability than those with normal hearing, and participants with both normal hearing and hearing impairment started turns later and with more variability in the presence of noise. Overall, in the presence of noise, talkers spoke louder and slower, increased the duration of their pauses but decreased their rate of occurrence, and produced longer interpausal units, that is, units of connected speech surrounded by silence. However, when compared to previous studies of conversations between normal-hearing partners, the pattern of changes in conversational behavior by the normal-hearing participants was very different in the most challenging noise condition. The extent to which these adaptations are made to reduce the difficulty experienced by their partner with hearing impairment vs. the difficulty they experience themselves is not clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of oral interaction in language learning is well recognised, and this paper examines the factors that hinder English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' active participation in online discussions during Synchronous Online Communication. Using focus groups with 51 Cypriot Greek-speaking students from three tertiary institutions in Cyprus, thematic analysis revealed that the perceived prominent factor inhibiting oral interaction in the online environment was the absence of eye gaze and its associated social functions. Specifically, eye gaze was identified as a signal for turn-taking, turn-yielding, and turndenying, whose absence hindered learners' ability to interpret their peers' and teachers' intentions and expectations. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications for technologists, software developers, students, language teachers, and language teacher educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of JALT Journal is the property of Japan Association for Language Teaching and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Firms increasingly employ artificial intelligence (AI) gift recommendation tools to assist consumers with their gift choices. Yet, a notable gap exists in understanding consumers' responses to AI recommendations in a gift giving context. Through five studies, we found that social closeness between the giver and recipient significantly affects the use of AI gift recommendation tools, driven by two underlying mechanisms: expected relational signaling and preference matching. In addition to establishing these effects, this research identifies relevant boundary conditions. Our findings reveal that self‐oriented perfectionism increases preference matching for gifts to distant friends, while revealing the giver's identity boosts AI tool use for close friends by reducing relational signaling expectations. Additionally, AI tools capable of turn‐taking enhance preference matching and AI tool use, especially for gifts to close friends. Our findings advance the understanding of how and why social closeness influences givers' utilization of AI gift recommendation tools and offer valuable insights for practitioners on designing these tools more effectively, considering the nuances of social relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persistent deficits in the ability to initiate social interaction is a core criterion for a diagnosis of autism, and quantitative research shows that children with autism initiate fewer bids for interaction than neurotypical children. This conversation-analytic examination of two interactions between a man with autism, Harry, and two familiar carers will provide insights into the scope of his competences in topic initiation. Analyses of the participants' online management of turn-taking and sequence organisation demonstrate that Harry's topic initiations can be facilitated by a high silence tolerance of the interlocutor in initiation-relevant sequential environments. Specifically, Harry initiates more topics, when his conversational partner endures the long silences after possible sequence closure. The analyses underline that Harry does not lack neither competences nor motivation to successfully execute initiations. Instead, it is proposed that Harry's deficits in initiation should be reconceptualised as a difficulty of initiating interaction on neurotypical terms, where the standard maximum silence between turns is approximately one second. Hereby, the study emphasises that communicative competences of individuals with autism are interactionally managed, emerging in interaction with conversational partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daily conversation is usually face-to-face and characterized by rapid and fluent exchange of turns between interlocutors. With the need to communicate across long distances, advances in communication media, online audio communication, and online video communication have become convenient alternatives for an increasing number of people. However, the fluency of turn-taking may be influenced when people communicate using these different modes. In this study, we conducted a corpus analysis of face-to-face, online audio, and online video conversations collected from the internet. The fluency of turn-taking in face-to-face conversations differed from that of online audio and video conversations. Namely, the timing of turn-taking was shorter and with more overlaps in face-to-face conversations compared with online audio and video conversations. This can be explained by the limited ability of online communication modes to transmit non-verbal cues and network latency. In addition, our study could not completely exclude the effect of formality of conversation. The present findings have implications for the rules of turn-taking in human online conversations, in that the traditional rule of no-gap–no-overlap may not be fully applicable to online conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being a competent L2 speaker involves not only acquiring knowledge of grammatical forms in the target language, but also developing pragmatic competence, which is crucial in the appropriate production of speech acts, (im)politeness strategies, and understanding the use of discourse markers. The present article deals with how EFL learners of different mother tongues manage to develop their pragmatic competence through the use of the turn-taking marker pues. The aim of the study is to investigate the different pragmatic functions of pues in the initial syntactic position and to analyse in which discourse functions it appears to be more or less frequent in different groups of learners. In this manner, it will be studied how the use of this turn-taking pragmatic marker can serve as an indicator of the development of pragmatic competence in Dutch-speaking Belgian, Italian and Slovenian learners of Spanish. The results of the learner group will be compared to those of a native benchmark group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Research suggests that interlocutors manage the timing demands of conversation by preparing what they want to say early. In three experiments, we used a verbal question-answering task to investigate what aspects of their response speakers prepare early. In all three experiments, participants answered more quickly when the critical content (here, barks) necessary for answer preparation occurred early (e.g., Which animal barks and is also a common household pet?) rather than late (e.g., Which animal is a common household pet and also barks?). In the individual experiments, we found no convincing evidence that participants were slower to produce longer answers, consisting of multiple words, than shorter answers, consisting of a single word. There was also no interaction between these two factors. A combined analysis of the first two experiments confirmed this lack of interaction, and demonstrated that participants were faster to answer questions when the critical content was available early rather than late and when the answer was short rather than long. These findings provide tentative evidence for an account in which interlocutors prepare the content of their answer as soon as they can, but sometimes do not prepare its length (and thus form) until they are ready to speak.

This research aimed to find out the dominant types of interruptions employed by participants and to find out the purposes of interruptions done by the participants of Ellen DeGeneres show. This research employed quantitative descriptive research. The subjects of this research were two of the most viewed videos uploaded from October-November 2020. The interruption employed by the participants and the purposes of interruptions done by the participants were classified using an instrument datasheet following Murata’s theory. The first results of this research show that interruptions types done by the participants of the Ellen DeGeneres show namely cooperative and intrusive, and the dominant types employed in the Ellen DeGeneres show was a cooperative interruption. The second result finding showed all that the purposes of interruptions done by the participants of the Ellen DeGeneres show namely agreement, assistance, clarification, disagreement, floor-taking, and tangentialization.

The natural ecology of language is conversation, with individuals taking turns speaking to communicate in a back-and-forth fashion. Language in this context involves strings of words that a listener must process while simultaneously planning their own next utterance. It would thus be highly advantageous if language users distributed information within an utterance in a way that may facilitate this processing–planning dynamic. While some studies have investigated how information is distributed at the level of single words or clauses, or in written language, little is known about how information is distributed within spoken utterances produced during naturalistic conversation. It also is not known how information distribution patterns of spoken utterances may differ across languages. We used a set of matched corpora (CallHome) containing 898 telephone conversations conducted in six different languages (Arabic, English, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish), analyzing more than 58,000 utterances, to assess whether there is evidence of distinct patterns of information distributions at the utterance level, and whether these patterns are similar or differed across the languages. We found that English, Spanish, and Mandarin typically show a back-loaded distribution, with higher information (i.e., surprisal) in the last half of utterances compared with the first half, while Arabic, German, and Japanese showed front-loaded distributions, with higher information in the first half compared with the last half. Additional analyses suggest that these patterns may be related to word order and rate of noun and verb usage. We additionally found that back-loaded languages have longer turn transition times (i.e., time between speaker turns). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that interlocutors manage the timing demands of conversation by preparing what they want to say early. In three experiments, we used a verbal question-answering task to investigate what aspects of their response speakers prepare early. In all three experiments, participants answered more quickly when the critical content (here, barks) necessary for answer preparation occurred early (e.g., Which animal barks and is also a common household pet?) rather than late (e.g., Which animal is a common household pet and also barks?). In the individual experiments, we found no convincing evidence that participants were slower to produce longer answers, consisting of multiple words, than shorter answers, consisting of a single word. There was also no interaction between these two factors. A combined analysis of the first two experiments confirmed this lack of interaction, and demonstrated that participants were faster to answer questions when the critical content was available early rather than late and when the answer was short rather than long. These findings provide tentative evidence for an account in which interlocutors prepare the content of their answer as soon as they can, but sometimes do not prepare its length (and thus form) until they are ready to speak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vocal turn-taking has been described in a diversity of species. Yet, a model that is able to capture the various processes underlying this social behaviour across species has not been developed. To this end, here we recorded a large and diverse dataset of marmoset monkey vocal behaviour in social contexts comprising one, two and three callers and developed a model to determine the keystone factors that affect the dynamics of these natural communicative interactions. Notably, marmoset turn-taking did not abide by coupled-oscillator dynamics, but rather call timing was overwhelmingly stochastic in these exchanges. Our features-based model revealed four key factors that encapsulate the majority of patterns evident in the behaviour, ranging from internal processes, such as particular states of the individual driving increased calling, to social context-driven suppression of calling. These findings indicate that marmoset vocal turn-taking is affected by a broader suite of mechanisms than previously considered and that our model provides a predictive framework with which to further explicate this natural behaviour at both the behavioural and neurobiological levels, and for direct comparisons with the analogous behaviour in other species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a multimodal approach to grammatical aspect, traditionally seen in linguistics as a verbal-morphological category. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we take as our object of study turn completions done with bodily movements and non-lexical vocalizations, focusing on the aspectual information they construct, and how this information is oriented to as relevant to the trajectory of action underway. We argue that the aspectual information constructed through the practice of completing a turn with bodily movements and non-lexical vocalizations is part of demonstrating the speaker's experiential knowledge relevant to the epistemic claims being made, in the service of securing some form of affiliative uptake from the recipient regarding those claims. Pursuits designed in this way provide the recipient access to the speaker's "way of viewing the internal temporal constituency of [the] situation" (Comrie 1976: 3). Furthermore, we show that the aspectual information conveyed (i) by bodily movements, and (ii) co-occurring non-lexical vocalizations, are somewhat distinct from each other. Our study is the first that we are aware of to examine the category of grammatical aspect in turn completions and in this embodied and social-interactional way. Data are in American English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frequency distributions are known to widely affect psycholinguistic processes. The effects of word frequency in turns-at-talk, the nucleus of social action in conversation, have, by contrast, been largely neglected. This study probes into this gap by applying corpus-linguistic methods on the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC). The latter includes continuous pupil size measures of participants of the recorded conversations, allowing for a systematic investigation of patterns in the contained speech and language on the one hand and their relation to concurrent processing costs they may incur in speakers and recipients on the other hand. We test a first hypothesis in this vein, analyzing whether word frequency distributions within turns-at-talk are correlated with interlocutors' processing effort during the production and reception of these turns. Turns are found to generally show a regular distribution pattern of word frequency, with highly frequent words in turn-initial positions, mid-range frequency words in turn-medial positions, and low-frequency words in turn-final positions. Speakers' pupil size is found to tend to increase during the course of a turn at talk, reaching a climax toward the turn end. Notably, the observed decrease in word frequency within turns is inversely correlated with the observed increase in pupil size in speakers, but not in recipients, with steeper decreases in word frequency going along with steeper increases in pupil size in speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech processing, turn structure, and information packaging. Crucially, we propose that the intensification of processing effort in speakers during a turn at talk is owed to an informational climax, which entails a progression from high-frequency, low-information words through intermediate levels to low-frequency, high-information words. At least in English conversation, interlocutors seem to make use of this pattern as one way to achieve efficiency in conversational interaction, creating a regularly recurring distribution of processing load across speaking turns, which aids smooth turn transitions, content prediction, and effective information transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we document the coordination of eye gaze and manual signing in a local sign language from Nebaj, Guatemala. We analyze gaze patterns in two conversations in which signers described the book Frog Where Are You to an interlocutor. The signers include a deaf child who narrated the book to a hearing interlocutor and her grandfather, who is also deaf, as he described the same book to his hearing grandson during a separate conversation. We code the two narratives for gaze target and sign type, analyzing the relationship between eye gaze and sign type as well as describing patterns in the sequencing of eye gaze targets. Both signers show a strong correlation between sign type and the direction of their eye gaze. As in previous literature, signers looked to a specialized medial space while producing signs that enact the action of characters in discourse in contrast to eye gaze patterns for non-enacting signs. Our analysis highlights both pragmatic–interactional and discursive–narrative functions of gaze. The pragmatic–interactional use of gaze primarily relates to the management of visual attention and turn-taking, while the discursive–narrative use of gaze marks the distinction between narrator and character perspective within stretches of narration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In psychotherapy, verbal communication is central to the therapeutic process. However, when patients remain silent, it can serve various functions, such as reflecting more deeply or hesitating to elaborate on a topic. This article uses conversation analysis to examine a specific context in which silence occurs: After a patient has concluded his/her narrative, both the therapist and the patient resist the turn allocation by the respective other, resulting in mutual silence. The results indicate that both therapists and patients collaboratively generate this silence. Therapists typically end the silence with an intervention, addressing an aspect of the topic and treating the pause as intra-topic silence. The study is based on approximately 29 h of video recordings of German-speaking outpatient psychodynamic psychotherapy sessions. This research highlights the importance of therapists recognizing the different forms of silence that may emerge during psychotherapy.

Here we report on a rare and opportunistic acoustic turn-taking with an adult female humpback whale, known as Twain, in Southeast Alaska. Post hoc acoustic and statistical analyses of a 20-min acoustic exchange between the broadcast of a recorded contact call, known as a whup/throp, with call responses by Twain revealed an intentional human-whale acoustic (and behavioral) interaction. Our results show that Twain participated both physically and acoustically in three phases of interaction (Phase 1: Engagement, Phase 2: Agitation, Phase 3: Disengagement), independently determined by blind observers reporting on surface behavior and respiratory activity of the interacting whale. A close examination of both changes to the latency between Twains calls and the temporal matching to the latency of the exemplar across phases indicated that Twain was actively engaged in the exchange during Phase 1 (Engagement), less so during Phase 2 (Agitation), and disengaged during Phase 3 (Disengagement). These results, while preliminary, point to several key considerations for effective playback design, namely the importance of salient, dynamic and adaptive playbacks, that should be utilized in experimentation with whales and other interactive nonhuman species.

This study explores the factors influencing turn-taking coordination in virtual reality (VR) environments, with a focus on identifying key interaction dynamics that affect the ease of gaining speaking opportunities. By analyzing VR interaction data through logistic regression and clustering, we identify significant variables impacting turn-taking success and categorize typical interaction states that present unique coordination challenges. The findings reveal that features related to interaction proactivity, individual status, and communication quality significantly impact turn-taking outcomes. Furthermore, clustering analysis identifies five primary interaction contexts: high competition, intense interaction, prolonged single turn, high-status role, and low activity, each with unique turn-taking coordination requirements. This work provides insights into enhancing turn-taking support systems in VR, emphasizing contextually adaptive feedback to reduce speaking overlap and turn-taking failures, thereby improving overall interaction flow in immersive environments.

Most language use occurs in face-to-face conversation, which involves rapid turn-taking. Seeing communicative bodily signals in addition to hearing speech may facilitate such fast responding. We tested whether this holds for co-speech hand gestures by investigating whether these gestures speed up button press responses to questions. Sixty native speakers of Dutch viewed videos in which an actress asked yes/no-questions, either with or without a corresponding iconic hand gesture. Participants answered the questions as quickly and accurately as possible via button press. Gestures did not impact response accuracy, but crucially, gestures sped up responses, suggesting that response planning may be finished earlier when gestures are seen. How much gestures sped up responses was not related to their timing in the question or their timing with respect to the corresponding information in speech. Overall, these results are in line with the idea that multimodality may facilitate fast responding during face-to-face conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the use of hand points in competitive epistemic and speakership environments in Mandarin-speaking conversation. It examines incoming speakers' points at a current speaker. This study employs multimodal conversation-analytic methods to analyse 334 min of triadic interaction. 40 points directed at a current speaker by an incoming speaker are the focus of analysis. This study finds that these points indicate an upcoming bid for the floor, thereby carrying out self-selection for speakership. In addition, the turn introduced by the incoming speaker's point suggests that they know at least as much as the current speaker about the issue at hand, and can implicate epistemic and speakership competition. As such, these points foreshadow delivery of a weakly aligning turn or a disaligning turn, and may accomplish either affiliation or disaffiliation. This study generates new knowledge about the interactional functions of points in multiparty conversation, and suggests potential phenomena for cross-linguistic comparison. • An incoming speaker's point at the current speaker can project incipient turn entry or facilitate immediate turn entry. • The turn introduced by the incoming speaker's point suggests an authoritative epistemic stance about the issue at hand. • These points indicate that the turn will have a relationship with the current line of talk. • The turn introduced by the point may take issue with the design or action of the previous turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To successfully interact in a new language, learners must effectively take turns and manage the floor. Expectations and rules for turn-taking can differ between languages, making this more than a question of grammatical proficiency and vocabulary acquisition. In addition, the increased use of videoconferencing software in education and beyond makes learning to manage the floor in virtual spaces a useful skill for everyone, including language learners. To analyze the turn-taking behaviors of first language (L1) speakers of Japanese using English in videoconferencing interactions, three classes of first-year university students with intermediate level English skills were selected to have their in-class videoconferencing discussions recorded. Three of the recorded discussions were selected and analyzed to identify turn-taking behaviors and to analyze the techniques that influenced the speakers' ability to succeed. Participants were observed to leave long gaps between speakers at turn transitions and rarely extended discussion topics to include multiple turns per speaker. There were three behaviors that were observed that helped some participants to reduce the gap between speakers. Clearly marking the end of a turn, energetic use of verbal backchannels, and comfort with unintentional overlap all seemed to be correlated with improved transition speed. Increased use of questions did lead to some topics being discussed beyond a single turn per speaker, but the difference was relatively small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze patterns of interaction and turn-taking in the context of classroom learning using a classroom discourse analysis approach. This research focuses on understanding the communication dynamics between teachers and students and identifying dominant patterns during the learning process. The method used is qualitative, with data collection through observation using video recorder instruments in class XI SMK Muhammadiyah Mertoyudan. The research participants were a teacher and class XI students of SMK Muhammadiyah Mertoyudan, totalling 24 students, consisting of 1 teacher and 23 students. The data results show the sequences developed from the questions between teacher and student interactions. The results of this study support the view that the discursive role of the Feedback sequence in IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback Sequence) is to develop dialogue between teachers and students. The findings of this study on the IRF pattern are that the teacher dominates the communication in the classroom 63,4% and students 36,6%. The findings indicate that the non-delivery of learning is the main problem of students' lack of understanding of the material, lack of students' ability to think critically, and responsiveness to students. These findings can be used to develop more inclusive and effective teaching strategies that pay attention to a more balanced distribution of talk time and interaction between teachers and students. This research contributes to the literature on Classroom Discourse Analysis by filling the knowledge gap on the classroom's interaction pattern and its implications for teaching practices with feedback in IRF. The results of this study can provide valuable insights for educational practitioners and help improve students' critical communication strategies in the classroom.

Frequency distributions are known to widely affect psycholinguistic processes. The effects of word frequency in turns-at-talk, the nucleus of social action in conversation, have, by contrast, been largely neglected. This study probes into this gap by applying corpus-linguistic methods on the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC). The latter includes continuous pupil size measures of participants of the recorded conversations, allowing for a systematic investigation of patterns in the contained speech and language on the one hand and their relation to concurrent processing costs they may incur in speakers and recipients on the other hand. We test a first hypothesis in this vein, analyzing whether word frequency distributions within turns-at-talk are correlated with interlocutors' processing effort during the production and reception of these turns. Turns are found to generally show a regular distribution pattern of word frequency, with highly frequent words in turn-initial positions, mid-range frequency words in turn-medial positions, and low-frequency words in turn-final positions. Speakers' pupil size is found to tend to increase during the course of a turn at talk, reaching a climax toward the turn end. Notably, the observed decrease in word frequency within turns is inversely correlated with the observed increase in pupil size in speakers, but not in recipients, with steeper decreases in word frequency going along with steeper increases in pupil size in speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech processing, turn structure, and information packaging. Crucially, we propose that the intensification of processing effort in speakers during a turn at talk is owed to an informational climax, which entails a progression from high-frequency, low-information words through intermediate levels to low-frequency, high-information words. At least in English conversation, interlocutors seem to make use of this pattern as one way to achieve efficiency in conversational interaction, creating a regularly recurring distribution of processing load across speaking turns, which aids smooth turn transitions, content prediction, and effective information transfer.

This study examines conversational structure and turn management in interactions between clients and officers of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) at a Nigerian drivers licensing office in order to unveil how sociocultural nuances shape the structure of conversations in this context. The data comprised 21 samples of interaction sequences which were purposively selected from over 13 hours of tape-recordings and analysed using Conversation Analysis. The findings reveal that the interactions are organised in adjacency pairs and expanded most of the time with insertion sequences. Also, turns are shared between the officers and clients through self-selection, current-speaker-selects-next and sustained-turns procedures, which are largely within the control of the officers. There are various cues of silence and pauses, socio-centric sequences, adjacency pairs, drawls, pitch, overlap and interruptions, which are turn-taking and turn-giving cues in the interactions. These features reveal the interactions as institutional talk, which is peculiar to this social environment.

The characteristic feature of contemporary poetry is an increased attention to the prag­matics of the message. The Internet influences the activation of the communication function, and metalinguistic reflection in poetry manifests itself through the violation of grammatical norms, the graphic highlighting of pragmatic markers, and the representation of computer interface elements such as messengers, social networks, etc. At the same time, the media inter­face creates a multiplicity of addressing and influences the strategies of indirect subjectivation that manifest themselves as a result of several shifts (deictic, functional, etc.), allowing us to deal with the updating of the communication parameters of a poetic utterance. This modifica­tion involves bringing the communication channel to the fore, as well as explicating the turn-taking indices in its non-conventional function. Thus, at the present stage, the poetic message is supplemented by new (linguistic and media) means, including interfaces, pseudo-dialogue models characteristic of online correspondence, conversational patterns, and discourse mark­ers used in online communication. The article analyzes the peculiarities of the functioning of pragmatic markers as indicators of subjectivity and addressing on the Internet.

During face‐to‐face conversation, transitions between speaker turns are incredibly fast. These fast turn exchanges seem to involve next speakers predicting upcoming semantic information, such that next turn planning can begin before a current turn is complete. Given that face‐to‐face conversation also involves the use of communicative bodily signals, an important question is how bodily signals such as co‐speech hand gestures play into these processes of prediction and fast responding. In this corpus study, we found that hand gestures that depict or refer to semantic information started before the corresponding information in speech, which held both for the onset of the gesture as a whole, as well as the onset of the stroke (the most meaningful part of the gesture). This early timing potentially allows listeners to use the gestural information to predict the corresponding semantic information to be conveyed in speech. Moreover, we provided further evidence that questions with gestures got faster responses than questions without gestures. However, we found no evidence for the idea that how much a gesture precedes its lexical affiliate (i.e., its predictive potential) relates to how fast responses were given. The findings presented here highlight the importance of the temporal relation between speech and gesture and help to illuminate the potential mechanisms underpinning multimodal language processing during face‐to‐face conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Telephone-based remote interpreting has come into widespread use in multilingual encounters, all the more so in times of refugee crises and the large influx of asylum-seekers into Europe. Nevertheless, the linguistic practices in this mode of communication have not yet been examined comprehensively. This article therefore investigates selected aspects of turn-taking and clarification sequences during semi-authentic telephone-interpreted counselling sessions for refugees (Arabic–German). A quantitative analysis reveals that limited audibility makes it more difficult for interpreters to claim their turn successfully; in most cases, however, turn-taking occurs smoothly. The trouble sources that trigger queries are mainly content-related and interpreters vary greatly in the ways they deal with such difficulties. Contrary to what one might expect, the study shows that coordination fails only rarely during telephone-based remote interpreting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most bird species, parents raise offspring cooperatively. In some cases, this cooperation extends to helpers‐at‐the‐nest who assist the breeders with a range of tasks.While cooperative food provisioning might merely arise incidentally, as a result of the efforts of carers that act independently from each other, recent studies suggest that birds may coordinate by taking turns in visiting the nest. However, evidence that such coordination emerges because individuals actively respond to each other's behaviour is controversial, and the potential benefits of carers' alternation remain unknown.We addressed this knowledge gap by analysing a multiyear dataset for cooperatively breeding carrion crows Corvus corone, comprising 8693 nest visits across 50 groups.Our results reveal that turn‐taking does occur in this species and that all group members, regardless of their sex and social role (breeder/helper), tend to alternate at the nest with other carers rather than to make repeat visits.Importantly, we found that the body mass of nestlings increased significantly with the degree of carers' alternation, possibly because well‐coordinated groups provided food at more regular intervals.Using earlier monitoring data, the observed increase in body mass is predicted to substantially boost postfledging survival rates. Our analyses demonstrate that alternation in nestling provisioning has measurable fitness benefits in this study system.This raises the possibility that cooperatively breeding carrion crows, as well as other bird species with similarly coordinated brood provisioning, exhibit specialized behavioural strategies that enable effective alternation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistic Landscape: An International Journal (LL) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Philologist / Filolog: Journal of Language, Literary & Cultural Studies is the property of University of Banja Luka, Faculty of Philology / Univerzitet u Banjoj Luci, Filoloski Fakultet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study investigates the turn-taking sequence, organisation of turns and the question patterns adopted during the examination of witnesses at the Oputa Panel sessions. The study employs purposive procedure in the selection of five questioning sessions as available on YouTube. The data is transcribed and analysed using the linguistic approach of discourse analysis. In the findings, the counsel and the witness situate their talks firmly in the legal field with adherence to the turn-taking rules, explicit through yes/no responses, providing explanation to information seeking questions and also through the way the lawyers structure their questions to reveal narratives that shed light on the petition. The study notes that all activities and accomplishments at the Panel are carried out through the singular act of questioning. In order to prevent the language of conflict resolution procedures from seeming to alienate certain parties, particularly lay litigants, the study suggested the creation of a system for resolving disputes that is not closely tied to the usage of a particular linguistic form. Future efforts should focus on integrating additional language theories, such as psycholinguistics and critical discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) combines the repeatability and strength of robots and human's ability of cognition and planning to enable a flexible and efficient production mode. The ideal HRC process is that robots can smoothly assist workers in complex environments. This means that robots need to know the process's turn-taking earlier, adapt to the operating habits of different workers, and make reasonable plans in advance to improve the fluency of HRC. However, many of the current HRC systems ignore the fluent turn-taking between robots and humans, which results in unsatisfactory HRC and affects productivity. Moreover, there are uncertainties in humans as different humans have different operating proficiency, resulting in different operating speeds. This requires the robots to be able to make early predictions of turn-taking even when human is uncertain. Therefore, in this paper, an early turn-taking prediction method in HRC assembly tasks with Izhi neuron model-based spiking neural networks (SNNs) is proposed. On this basis, dynamic motion primitives (DMP) are used to establish trajectory templates at different operating speeds. The length of the sequence sent to the SNN network is judged by the matching degree between the observed data and the template, so as to adjust to human uncertainty. The proposed method is verified by the gear assembly case. The results show that our method can shorten the human-robot turn-taking recognition time under human uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversation is a time‐pressured environment. Recognizing a social action (the "speech act," such as a question requesting information) early is crucial in conversation to quickly understand the intended message and plan a timely response. Fast turns between interlocutors are especially relevant for responses to questions since a long gap may be meaningful by itself. Human language is multimodal, involving speech as well as visual signals from the body, including the face. But little is known about how conversational facial signals contribute to the communication of social actions. Some of the most prominent facial signals in conversation are eyebrow movements. Previous studies found links between eyebrow movements and questions, suggesting that these facial signals could contribute to the rapid recognition of questions. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether early eyebrow movements (eyebrow frown or raise vs. no eyebrow movement) facilitate question identification. Participants were instructed to view videos of avatars where the presence of eyebrow movements accompanying questions was manipulated. Their task was to indicate whether the utterance was a question or a statement as accurately and quickly as possible. Data were collected using the online testing platform Gorilla. Results showed higher accuracies and faster response times for questions with eyebrow frowns, suggesting a facilitative role of eyebrow frowns for question identification. This means that facial signals can critically contribute to the communication of social actions in conversation by signaling social action‐specific visual information and providing visual cues to speakers' intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual differences in children's social communication have been shown to mediate the relationship between poor vocabulary or grammar and behavioural difficulties. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that social communication skills predict difficulties with peers over and above vocabulary and grammar scores. The essential social communicative skills needed to maintain positive peer relationships revolve around conversation. Children with weaker conversation skills are less likely to make and maintain friendships. While helping all children to participate actively in collaborative conversations is part of school curricula, evidence-based training on how to achieve this is rarely provided for teachers. In this review, we first provide an overview of the key components of conversation skills and the cognitive abilities required to maintain them. We then present a narrative review of randomised controlled trials and experimental studies that either trained child conversation skills or included conversation skills in both training and outcome measures. Most of the studies focussed on training conversational ability in autistic children. The general finding was that verbally fluent autistic children improve following conversation training on blind-assessed reciprocal conversational ability. Only two studies were found that trained conversation skills in typically developing children with adequate controls and outcome measures, which directly assessed conversational proficiency. Both studies focussed on typically developing children who, at baseline, were in the weaker third of the mainstream classroom. Importantly, training not only improved the conversational ability of these children, it also improved their rates of lunchtime interaction with peers and their peer popularity ratings. We argue that there is considerable potential for supporting conversation skills in the classroom as a universal or Tier 1 intervention. Future research should explore whether conversation skills training would benefit the whole classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]