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As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
To date, little is known about prosodic accommodation and its conversational functions in instances of overlapping talk in conversation. A major conversational action that happens in overlap is turn competition. It is not known whether participants accommodate prosodic parameters locally in the overlapped turn (initialisation) or access a repertoire of prosodic patterns that refer to general prosodic parameter norms (normalisation) when competing for the turn in overlap. This paper investigates the initialisation and normalisation of fundamental frequency (f0) and assesses its role as a resource for turn competition in overlap. We drew instances of overlapping talk from a corpus of conversational multi-party interactions in British English. We annotated the overlaps on a competitiveness scale and categorised them by overlap onset position and conversational function. We automatically extracted f0 parameters from the speech signal and processed them into f0 accommodation features that represent the normalising or the initialising use of f0. Using decision tree classification we found that f0 accommodation is only relevant as a turn competitive resource in overlaps that start clearly before a speaker transition. In this turn context, we found that normalising and initialising f0 features can both be relevant turn competitive resources. Their deployment depends on the conversational function of overlap.
The relation between speed and curvature provides a characterization of the spatio-temporal orchestration of kinematic movements. For hand movements, this relation has been reported to follow a power law with exponent -1/3. The same power law has been claimed to govern articulatory movements. We studied the functional form of speed as predicted by curvature using electromagnetic articulography, focusing on three sensors: the tongue tip, the tongue body, and the lower lip. Of specific interest to us was the question of whether the speed-curvature relation is modified by articulatory practice, gauged with words’ frequencies of occurrence. Although analyses imposing linearity a priori indeed supported a power law, relaxation of this linearity assumption revealed that the effect of curvature on speed levels off substantially for lower values of curvature. A modification of the power law is proposed that takes this curvature into account. Furthermore, controlling statistically for number of phones and word duration, we observed that the speed-curvature function was further modulated by an interaction of lexical frequency by curvature, such that for increasing frequency, speed decreased slightly for low curvatures while it increased slightly for high curvatures. The modulation of the balance between speed and curvature by lexical frequency provides further evidence that the skill of articulation improves with practice on a word-to-word basis, and challenges theories of speech production.