This study investigates the interactional framework of mediation discourse in the Moroccan television program “The Mediator”. Drawing upon Conversation Analysis (CA) (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974), and Goffman’s (1981) concept of participation framework, the study examines how mechanisms of institutional discourse, more precisely the turn-taking system, participation statuses, and hybrid interactional framework, operate to handle interpersonal disputes. By conducting an in-depth analysis of selected episodes, the study probes into how the principal mediator, disputants, and co-mediators jointly reframe conflict narratives, oscillate between institutional and conversational speech exchange systems, and negotiate their positions within a media-regulated context. The findings of the study reveal how institutional discourse practices such as pre-allocated turns, structurally determined participation framework, and regulated dyadic interaction are strategically implemented to minimise discordance and uphold normative protocols of mediation and conflict resolution processes. The present study contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how the interactional framework of mediation functions as a discursive mechanism to mitigate confrontation and reframe contentious issues. It further addresses a critical gap in the literature by examining mediation and conflict resolution discourse within Arab and North African contexts, regions that have received limited attention in media and discourse research.

Robot failures in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), though often stemming from technical limitations, can have severe effects on the interactional dynamics between humans and robots. Prior empirical research has led to conflicting findings on how such failures influence user perceptions and the overall success of the interaction. In this study, we investigate how human participants respond to robot failures on a moment-to-moment basis, with a particular focus on how social roles, responsibilities, and agency are negotiated as these episodes unfold. We examine how responses and helping behaviors are instantiated, and which factors facilitate or hinder recovery strategies. We focus on kinematic failures, such as interruptions in motion, unsuccessful grasping, or dropping objects, that occurred during Tic-Tac-Toe games between human participants (n = 17) and the humanoid robot Epi. Our analysis combines multimodal conversation analysis (MCA) and thick description, drawing on our interdisciplinary backgrounds in cognitive science and feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS). We present selected interactional sequences that illustrate a range of participant responses, including physical repair and scaffolding, interpretive support, emotional care, sustained monitoring, and dynamic negotiation of agency. These observations demonstrate how humans co-construct interactional continuity and robot competence through distributed, multimodal, and affective forms of help. They also reveal how agency is dynamically reconfigured, and how roles and responsibilities are distributed across human and robotic actors. We show how the burden of repair often falls to the human participant and conclude by reflecting on the setting and methods used, specifically in regards to the role of the robot as a research tool.

Energy conversion analysis of underwater cylindrical shell-bulkheads system utilizing structural intensity method

ABSTRACT This study investigates teachers’ informal formative assessment (IFA) signalled by negative evidence in classroom interactions. In this single-case study, we examined classroom recordings of a language teacher and analysed micro-moments of the interaction using Conversation Analysis (CA). Concentrating on detailed excerpts of classroom interactions, we discuss how negative evidence signals the teacher’s IFA process. We provide evidence that this process paves the way for maximising learning opportunities and shaping learner contributions in the immediate/subsequent turns of speech following a teacher’s assessment and feedback, thus underscoring the concept of Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC). By presenting insights into the interactional patterns of IFA in second language (L2) classes, our findings contribute to the growing body of research integrating assessment and classroom interaction.

A long-standing assumption in the language sciences is that the mental representation of language is based on constituents-that is, hierarchical structures rooted in grammar. We provide evidence from English for a more basic kind of linguistic representation involving smaller, linear chunks of structure akin to sequences of parts-of-speech elements-such as VERB PREPOSITION DETERMINER shared between the strings added to a and defined by the. Across four preregistered phrasal decision experiments (total N = 497), we show that it is possible to prime such linear structures, even in the absence of constituents. In two additional corpus analyses of eye-tracked reading (N = 68) and conversation (N = 358), we establish the external validity of the effect. These results provide evidence of multiword language structures that are not explainable in terms of constituents as traditionally construed. This poses a challenge for accounts of linguistic representation, including generative and constructionist approaches.

ABSTRACT This study examines how a teacher educator employed revoicing practices to manage negative evaluative peer feedback during post‐microteaching conferences in an English‐medium instruction teacher education context. Using applied conversation analysis, video recordings of 15 microteaching sessions and subsequent peer feedback discussions were analyzed, involving Korean preservice EFL teachers. The analysis revealed three distinct types of revoicing strategies, which can be considered to be a subset of revoicing: mitigative revoicing, which softened negative evaluative peer feedback to reduce face threats; reformulative revoicing, which clarified and professionalized unclear peer comments; and elaborative revoicing, which expanded upon peer observations to enhance their pedagogical value. These strategies enabled the teacher educator to navigate the inherent tension between maintaining a supportive learning environment and facilitating meaningful feedback among peers in a multiparty feedback setting. The findings demonstrate that revoicing serves both face‐saving and pedagogical functions, allowing for the delivery of substantive feedback while preserving collegial relationships essential to effective teacher preparation programs.

ABSTRACT It is important for learners to be able to ask wh ‐questions in interaction. However, making wh ‐questions can be difficult for beginning‐level EFL leaners, particularly for those learners whose L1 and L2 differ in the way wh ‐questions are formed. Based on this point, we investigated the grammar searches of such EFL learners for wh ‐questions in interaction, using both conversation analysis (CA) and phonetic analysis. Sixty‐four beginning‐level child L1‐Korean EFL learners completed a paired conversation task in which they discussed the topic “birthdays.” The CA showed that grammar searches for wh ‐questions were initiated and resolved mostly by the speaker himself/herself, but less frequently with the help of the conversation partner. The phonetic analysis revealed that wh ‐words occurring in grammar searches were longer in duration, followed by longer pauses, and were generally associated with rise‐fall or rise‐level pitch contours in general. These findings provide useful implications for EFL teaching: the use of formulaic expressions, interactive activities, and corrective feedback can facilitate EFL learners’ development of wh ‐questions.

Abstract This paper examines the strategic deployment of humor by Mandarin Chinese speakers during first conversations as a way of sharing affect and establishing interpersonal connections. Through this detailed analysis of first conversations, three distinct humor practices emerge as particularly salient: teasing, animated performance, and conventionalized language play. These practices are manifested through distinctive vehicles to generate humor and establish relational connections. The findings reveal that humor practices play an important role that extends beyond mere amusement, particularly in the context of initial interactions. By deploying these practices, speakers of Mandarin Chinese create moments of shared affect that help them build relational connections with their unacquainted interlocutors. This research contributes to our understanding of the intricate relationship between humor, affect-sharing, and interpersonal connections, demonstrating how speakers of Mandarin Chinese index their affective stance in order to establish relational connections with their unacquainted counterparts.

ABSTRACT Global population aging has created unprecedented social isolation challenges among elderly populations, with significant negative health consequences. To address this, we propose ELDER‐MATCH, a personality‐aware expert system that moves beyond conventional interest‐ or need‐based matchmaking. By leveraging AI‐powered social robots as an interactive interface, our system helps elderly individuals form not just connections, but suitable and sustainable social relationships based on a deeper understanding of their personality and compatibility. We adopted a two‐stage framework: (1) a BERT‐based natural language processing stage deriving knowledge from conversational analysis to infer Big Five personality traits, and (2) a K‐means clustering stage employing a hybrid knowledge representation to identify compatible social connections based on weighted combinations of personality vectors, interests, and geographical constraints. The social robot provides an intuitive, accessible interface for knowledge acquisition and recommendation delivery, tailored specifically to elderly users with varying technological familiarity. The system was evaluated with 83 older adults across multiple community‐based settings. In Stage 2, our unsupervised learning approach identified seven distinct social compatibility clusters, each with specific reasoning rules guiding the recommendation engine. The expert system effectively facilitated meaningful social connections, with 76% of accepted recommendations resulting in ongoing relationships at the three‐month follow‐up. Beyond interests and needs, personality‐aware introductions reduce first‐meeting friction and improve trust calibration for older adults. We position ELDER‐MATCH as a mediator of human–human ties, and we articulate a “sunset‐by‐design” principle whereby the system fades as relationships stabilise. Longitudinal assessments revealed significant reductions in loneliness, expansion of participants' social networks, and notable improvements in psychological well‐being. These findings demonstrate that a two‐stage, personality‐aware expert system, coupled with a user‐centric interface, successfully bridges technological capabilities and social needs, advancing elderly social wellbeing through responsible AI application within the AI‐for‐Social‐Good paradigm. In practice, personality‐aware introductions reduce first‐meeting friction and calibrate trust for older adults—benefits that interest‐only systems rarely deliver in sustained relationships.

Instruction prompt tuning (IPT) uses crafted prompts and in-context demonstrations (ICD) to guide large language models (LLMs) in performing previously unseen tasks, transferring knowledge while keeping the LLM mostly frozen. Social media multi-party conversation (MPC) analysis, on the other hand, has achieved remarkable performance on in-domain tasks including exact speaker identification. However, due to several challenges such as the lack of contextual generalization, absence of adequate ICD, and biases in LLMs, significant work remains to be done for quantifying mental health on social media MPC data using out-of-domain (OOD) knowledge transfer. In this article we propose DoRA , a novel dual-encoder demonstration retriever architecture designed to transfer an LLM’s knowledge about MPC modeling for previously unseen depression screening tasks. Our method pairs soft embeddings of MPC prompts with top-ranked ICD claims for depression screening, leveraging IPT-based OOD cross-task transfer using DoRA for the first time. Experiments conducted in zero-shot and few-shot settings across benchmark datasets using multiple LLMs demonstrate significant downstream performance with DoRA . Specifically, there is a 21.54% increase in recall for depressed utterance classification and a 21.11% increase in F 1 score for depressed speaker identification. These results highlight DoRA ’s potential as a screening tool for digital mental health applications.

ABSTRACT Planetariums are privileged settings to show the night sky as seen from Earth. Nevertheless, they have the potential to go beyond that bi-dimensional view and present other perspectives to their audiences. This is relevant, since research shows that transcending a merely Earth-centered perspective positively influences learning outcomes. Even so, the use of other perspectives in the planetarium is seldom researched, and students often have difficulty understanding multiple perspectives and moving from two-dimensional representations to three-dimensional models. In response, a study was conducted in Portugal to map and characterize the tools used in the planetarium to show different perspectives and the methods used to implement them. A total of 47 planetarium sessions were video recorded and analyzed using conversation analysis. Findings show that most participating planetarians use tools with the intent of showing different perspectives in the context of a broad variety of thematics, mostly focused on solar system dynamics. Moreover, guides use both digital and analog tools, define them in the interaction, and make the change in perspectives explicit. The results contribute to the training of planetarians and the design of planetarium presentations. Future research should further investigate the practical use of these tools and their learning outcomes.

ABSTRACT Research on grammar pedagogy has shed much light on the effectiveness of different types of instruction (e.g. explicit vs. implicit, focus on form vs. focus on forms, etc.), but how grammar is explained in the moment-to-moment details of interaction remains under-researched. Using conversation analysis, this study provides a sequential account of unplanned grammar explanations from a high intermediate English as a Second Language course that was conducted entirely over Zoom for adults in a community-based programme. In doing so, eight practices for navigating the opening, core, and closing of grammar explanations are detailed in the relatively under-researched online pedagogical interaction context. Openings involved halting progressivity, isolating prior talk, and querying grammaticality, cores involved answering the query, invoking a rule, and tying back, and closings involved providing an upshot and claiming understanding. These findings contribute to the growing body of conversation analytic literature on explanations of grammar and illustrate practices that teachers can adopt and adapt to engage with talk about grammar.

This study examines how farm workers working with cattle talk to and interact with these non-human animals. This study presents linguistic animal studies and multi-species pragmatics, and it is based on fieldwork, interviews, and video recordings from several types of Finnish dairy farms. This study concentrates especially on one facet of human-cattle interaction: how humans use dung pushers and other sticks when communicating with cows. Thus, it draws on the materiality of language. It is shown how objects, bodies, and spaces, as well as words and linguistic constructions, are meaningful in human-animal interaction. Videoed recordings are analysed with multimodal conversation analysis. It is shown how dung pushers and snow stakes are used when steering cows, making them stand up, and pointing at things. It is then shown how these objects become 'meaning-carriers' for humans and for cows. For example, the dung pusher acquires four different meaning qualities for the human participants in the cattle barns: floor-cleaner quality, shepherd's-crook quality, pointer quality, and weapon quality. The study examines how the cows' and humans' Umwelts, the subjective meaning universes of these species and their constituent individuals, influence interaction on farms and how and why the dung pusher becomes a semiotic resource.

This research examines how intercultural communication unfolds in the animated series Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight (2022), focusing on the pragmatic processes that corroborate meaning-making across cultural boundaries. Drawing on István Kecskes’ (2013) Intercultural Pragmatics as a socio-cognitive framework, the study investigates how both shared and personally internalized cultural knowledge influences character interaction as well as communicative strategies and interpretation in a dynamic intercultural setting. Employing Conversation Analysis to examine selected scenes, this research identifies how speech acts, politeness strategies, turn-taking, repair sequences, and implicit assumptions navigate intercultural negotiation. The findings suggest that the series serves not only as a source of entertainment but also as a platform for the co-construction of meaning, cultural adaptation, and identity negotiation. Therefore, the research highlights the importance of context, salience, and prior experience in fostering intercultural understanding.

Methods for investigating electronic health records and patient-provider interaction: A scoping review.

"Everything looks reassuring.": Managing uncertainty during the emergency department discharge process.

BackgroundTo facilitate shared decision-making (SDM), it is important that doctors clearly present the decision to be made and the available treatment options to the patient. This study explored how treatment options after first-line therapy were presented in advanced lung cancer consultations.MethodsAudio recordings of 12 advanced lung cancer consultations between patients, their companions and doctors in three Norwegian hospitals were transcribed and analysed using Conversation Analysis. Data were collected between November 2019 and March 2022.ResultsDoctors employed three strategies when presenting treatment options to patients. These were (1) open option presentation, (2) selective option presentation and (3) recommended option presentation. Strategy (1) involved the doctor presenting all the possible treatment options in a balanced manner to the patient. With strategy (2), the doctor presented selected treatment options to the patient, and, for example, did not articulate the possibility of refraining from further therapy. Strategy (3) included the doctor’s explicit preference for certain treatment options.ConclusionsStrategies that doctors employ to present treatment options to patients facilitated SDM to different degrees, where some can challenge core principles of SDM, such as creating choice awareness. Doctors must be aware of their strategies to ensure that treatment options are presented to patients in a way that supports SDM.

In vitro cytotoxicity, oxidative stress, and inflammatory responses to 3D printing resins in human gingival fibroblasts, compared with CAD/CAM zirconia, CAD/CAM composite blocks and direct resin composites.

Multiscale analysis of bubble dynamics and energy conversion in centrifugal pump: A hybrid H2P-PBM approach

SEAD-MGFE-Net: Schrödinger equation-based adaptive dropout multi-granular feature enhancement network for conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis