View source for The Centre for Advanced Studies in Language & Communication (CASLC) at the University of York is delighted to present a talk by Kobin H. Kendrick, Judith Holler and Stephen C. Levison

{{Announcement
|Announcement Type=Seminar
|Full title=The Centre for Advanced Studies in Language &#38; Communication (CASLC) at the University of York presents a talk by Kobin H. Kendrick, Judith Holler and Stephen C. Levison
|Short title=CASLC guest talk
|Short summary=The Centre for Advanced Studies in Language & Communication (CASLC) at the University of York presents a talk by Kobin H. Kendrick, Judith Holler and Stephen C. Levison
|Announcement text=The Centre for Advanced Studies in Language & Communication (CASLC) at the University of York is delighted to present a talk by Kobin H. Kendrick, Judith Holler and Stephen C. Levison

Title:
On the multimodal nature of turn-taking: The interplay of talk, gaze and gesture in the coordination of turn transitions

Note: the talk will be given by the first author; the second author will be in attendance and will join in the discussion; the third author will be with us in spirit.

Date: Thursday 12th May 2022
Time: 2.30pm-4.00pm (UK time)
Place: Zoom (please see our site to register for the talk)

Abstract
Turn-taking is a fundamental and universal feature of conversation. A central question in research on turn-taking is how speakers recognize the points of possible turn completion where transitions occur. Over the last 50 years, a cumulative body of research in conversation analysis (CA) has investigated turn-taking through naturalistic observation and rigorous qualitative description, identifying the precise linguistic cues that signal the relevance of transition. In the CA model of turn-taking, visible bodily actions play a minimal role. Quantitative research outside the CA tradition has, however, argued that visual cues are in fact central to the organization of turn-taking, but these studies have tended to employ relatively coarse measures that lack the emic validity required by CA. In this talk, we begin to reconcile these disparate strands of research and present new quantitative evidence for the role that gaze and gesture play in the organization of turn-taking. The data come from a corpus of dyadic conversations in which participants wore eye-tracking glasses for direct measurement of their gaze while they were also recorded by multiple cameras for a fine-grained analysis of their gestures. Combining quantitative and conversation-analytic methods, we show how the direction of a speaker’s gaze and the temporal organization of their gestures influence the relevance of transition between speakers. The findings, we will argue, demonstrate the fundamentally multimodal nature of the human turn-taking system and bring us one step closer to a model of turn-taking in which visible bodily actions play a central role.

Presenter’s bio 
Kobin H. Kendrick is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of York. His research uses conversation analysis, at times combined with quantitative methods, to investigate basic organizations of social interaction such as turn-taking, action-sequencing, and repair. A recent line of research, conducted with Paul Drew, has examined the organization of assistance in interaction and identified linguistic and embodied methods by which participants recruit assistance. More can be found at http://www.kobinkendrick.org/.
|Year=2022
|Web link=https://www.york.ac.uk/language/research/centres/caslc/
|Categories (tags)=Uncategorized;
|From date=2022/05/12
|To date=2022/05/12
|Location=53.94611, -1.05177
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