Author Archives: Muhammad Umair

Using conversation analysis to improve hypothesis formation in the study of human interaction

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Adopting an eyetracking paradigm, we investigated the role of H*L, L*HL, L*H, H*LH, and deaccentuation at the intonational phrase-final position in online processing of information status in British English in natural speech. The role of H*L, L*H and deaccentuation was also examined in diphone- synthetic speech. It was found that H*L and L*HL create a strong bias to- wards newness, whereas L*H, like deaccentuation, creates a strong bias to- wards givenness. In synthetic speech, the same effect was found for H*L, L*H and deaccentuation, but it was delayed. The delay may not be caused entirely by the difference in the segmental quality between synthetic and natural speech. The pitch accent H*LH, however, appears to bias participants’ interpretation to the target word, independent of its information status. This finding was ex- plained in the light of the effect of durational information at the segmental level on word recognition.

Albert, S. & De Ruiter, J.P. (2018). Improving Human Interaction Research through Ecological Grounding. Collabra:Psychology 4(1): 1-14.

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Improving Human Interaction Research through Ecological Grounding

In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of falsificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (how we come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’ (how we test them). However, when studying human interaction, separating these contexts can lead to theories with low ecological validity that do not generalize well to life outside the lab. We propose borrowing research procedures from well-established inductive methodologies in interaction research during the process of discovering new regularities and analyzing natural data without being led by theory. We introduce research procedures including the use of naturalistic study settings, analytic transcription, collections of cases, and data analysis sessions, and illustrate these with examples from a successful cross-disciplinary study. We argue that if these procedures are used systematically and transparently throughout a research cycle, they will lead to more robust and ecologically valid theories about interaction within psychology and, with some adaptation, can enhance the reproducibility of research across many other areas of psychological science.

BUILDING A CORPUS OF MULTIMODAL INTERACTION IN YOUR FIELD SITE13 N. J. Enfield, S. C. Levinson, J. P. de Ruiter & T. Stivers

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Multimodal Interaction
Collect high quality video recordings of spontaneous, naturally- occurring interaction for transcription
To acquire a corpus of video data, for investigating the underlying structure(s) of interaction cross-linguistically and cross-culturally.

De Ruiter, Jan Peter. 2004. Response systems and signals of recipiency. In Asifa Majid (ed.), Field Manual Volume 9, 53-55. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

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The goal of this project is to gather cross cultural information on listeners’ feedback behavior during conversation. Listeners in a conversation usually provide short signals that indicate to the speaker that they are still “with the speaker”. These signals could be verbal (like for instance “mm hm” in English or “hm hm” in Dutch) or nonverbal (visual), like nodding. Often, these signals are produced in overlap with the speaker’s vocalization. If listeners do not produce these signals, speakers often invite them explicitly (e.g. “are you still there?” in a telephone conversation). Our goal is to investigate what kind of signals are used by listeners of different languages to signal “recipiency” to the speaker.