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Differences in Interactional Attitudes in Native and Second Languag Conversations: Quantitative Analyses of Multimodal Three-Party Corpus

2013; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 35 Linguagem: Inglês

1551-6709

Seiichi Yamamoto, Keiko Taguchi, Ichiro Umata, Kosuke Kabashima, Masafumi Nishida,

Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

Differences in Interactional Attitudes in Native and Second Language Conversations: Quantitative Analyses of Multimodal Three-Party Corpus Seiichi Yamamoto (seyamamo@mail.doshisha.ac.jp) Department of Information Systems Design, 1-3 Miyakodani, Tatara, Kyotanabe-shi, Kyoto, 610-0321, Japan Keiko Taguchi (dun0153@mail4.doshisha.ac.jp) Department of Information Systems Design, 1-3 Miyakodani, Tatara, Kyotanabe-shi, Kyoto, 610-0321, Japan Ichiro Umata (umata@nict.go.jp) National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, 619-0288, Japan Kosuke Kabashima (dtl0724@mail4.doshisha.ac.jp) Department of Information Systems Design, 1-3 Miyakodani, Tatara, Kyotanabe-shi, Kyoto, 610-0321, Japan Masafumi Nishida (mnishida@mail.doshisha.ac.jp) Department of Information Systems Design, 1-3 Miyakodani, Tatara, Kyotanabe-shi, Kyoto, 610-0321, Japan Abstract Quantitative analyses and the analyses of a questionnaire were conducted to examine the relations between participants’ communicative activities and their interactional attitudes in conversations both in their native and second languages. The two categories of conversations revealed different gaze patterns that reflected the differences in difficulties they had with communication and grounding patterns. The participants were less conscious of their own gazes in conversation in their second language than those in their native language probably because of the difficulties and mental pressure they felt. Keywords: Second language conversation; Language expertise; Utterance; Gaze; Grounding; Communication Introduction As modern society has become more global, the importance of conversations in a second language has been increasing more than ever before. People are traveling around the world either on business or for pleasure due to progress in transportation systems and advanced Internet technologies that connect areas that have different linguistic backgrounds. Organizations are increasingly forming teams with members whose mother tongues are not the same, and sometimes co-workers and collaborators from different countries are connected via the Internet. Second language conversations are commonly observed in daily life, and the expertise of conversational participants often ranges from low to high. An urgent issue today is to support mutual understanding in these conversations. Language use is a form of joint action that is carried out by groups of people who act in coordination. Their joint action involves not only verbal but also non-verbal activities to achieve a common grounding process, i.e., to form the basis of mutual understanding (Clark & Brennan 1991, Clark 1996). There have been quantitative studies that have reported that eye gazes play an important role in monitoring understanding by communication partners of the content of conversation and contributions made to the performance of collaborative tasks (Boyle, Anderson, & Newlands 1994, Clark & Krych 2004). Grounding is also an important process in second languages. There have been studies that have regarded nativeness as expertise and compared the grounding process between differing levels of language expertise (Kasper 2004, Hosoda 2006). Hosoda reported that participants' disfluencies or linguistic errors were usually not treated as problems with interactions, but they were oriented to differences in linguistic expertise by repair (a) when one speaker invited the other's repair, and (b) when mutual understanding was jeopardized unless one party repaired the other. Eye gazes and facial expressions play an important role in monitoring both partners’ understanding in the repair process. These studies have, however, been qualitative and there have been few quantitative analyses of the relation between the grounding process and non-verbal activities in second language conversations. Veinott et al. (1999) found that non-native speaker pairs benefited from video in route guiding tasks in the field of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), whereas native speaker pairs did not. They argued that this was