Abstract
ABSTRACTDoes blinking function as a type of feedback in conversation? To address this question, we built a corpus of Dutch conversations, identified short and long addressee blinks during extended turns, and measured their occurrence relative to the end of turn constructional units (TCUs), the location where feedback typically occurs. Addressee blinks were indeed timed to the end of TCUs. Also, long blinks were more likely than short blinks to occur during mutual gaze, with nods or continuers, and their occurrence was restricted to sequential contexts in which signaling understanding was particularly relevant, suggesting a special signaling capacity of long blinks.
Highlights
Language is primarily used in face-to-face conversation (Clark, 1996)
We focus our analysis first on all addressee blinks and examine potential differences in timing in different subsets of our data
We compare the multimodal compositionality of short and long blinks, followed by quantitative analyses with qualitative analyses of long addressee blinks in conversational context
Summary
Language is primarily used in face-to-face conversation (Clark, 1996). The role of the addressee in conversation has been viewed from two main perspectives in the language sciences. In “bilateral” views on conversation—widely adopted by conversation analysts and some psychologists—speaking and listening is considered a joint activity in which speaker and addressee coordinate moment by moment to maintain mutual understanding (Brennan, Galati, & Kuhlen, 2010; Clark, 1996; Goodwin, 1981; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Blink rate is correlated with group size (Tada et al, 2013), a measure of social complexity that has been linked to neocortex size (evidence used to support the “social brain hypothesis,” Dunbar, 1992) These findings suggest that in addition to peripheral physiological and central cognitive functions, blinking may serve a social-communicative function (see Mandel, Helokunnas, Pihko, & Hari, 2014; Nakano & Kitazawa, 2010; Tada et al, 2013). Addressee blinking as a signal of understanding has been described in Yélî Dnye, a spoken language of Papua New Guinea (Levinson & Brown, 2004)
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