Perception in Interaction

A collaboration between the Interactional Foundations of Language and the Categories across Language and Cognition projects, the Perception in Interaction subproject uses corpora of video-recorded interaction in a range of languages and cultures to study the meanings and uses of basic perception words like see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in conversation. The subproject examines the lexical semantics and semantic typology of perception words quantitatively and describes and accounts for uses of perception words in interaction that occur cross-linguistically.

Turn-taking and timing

The turn-taking system is a fundamental substrate of language use in interaction. This subproject examines turn-taking and the precise timing of turns from a cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary perspective, combining insights from the analysis of conversational corpora with experimental and statistical methods. Research in this subproject addresses the cues a next speaker uses to anticipate or ‘project’ the end of a prior speaker’s turn; the similarities and differences in the timing of responses to questions across a sample of ten language; and the implications of turn-taking for psycholinguistic models of production and comprehension in real-time interaction.

Questions

The questions subproject is a large-scale comparative study of over 3,500 question-response sequences drawn from naturally-occuring interactions across a sample of ten languages. A special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics offers a descriptive overview of each of the ten languages across a range of domains: the lexical, morphosyntactic, and prosodic resources that speakers use to form questions; the normative relationship between questions and responses; and the types of social action that speakers use questions to perform. In addition, an article in PNAS examines universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in a report on the timing of responses to polar questions across the ten languages.