Chapter 5
Inter-(dis)fluency across communication settings
This chapter presents the findings obtained from the DisReg corpus, covering “ordinary” versus
“institutional” aspects of multimodal talk, comparing productions of French students in two different language styles and
communication settings (i.e. class presentations versus face-to-face interactions, cf Chapter 3, Section I.1.3). As we have seen (cf Chapter 2, Section II), these differences cover many dimensions,
ranging from the type of delivery, the degree of preparation, to other social factors (i.e. register and type of addressee).
The main research question addressed in this chapter is whether all these inter-related factors do have an impact on the
distribution of fluencemes and gestures, and, if it is the case, how it is manifested in both the vocal/verbal and
visual-gestural channel.
This chapter is structured as follows: I first present research questions and hypotheses, some of which
stem from the ones formulated in Chapters 1 and 3.
In Sections II and III I present the quantitative and qualitative findings extracted from the annotations of
the data, which, similarly tot the study of SITAF, integrates different levels of analysis (speech, visuo-gestural, and
interactional) and mixes statistical and conversation-analytical methods. These findings are then discussed in Section III.
Article outline
- I.Research questions and hypotheses
- II.Quantitative findings
- 2.1Marker level: Rate, form, and duration of individual fluencemes
- 2.2Sequence level: Type, length, position, and patterns of co-occurrence
- 2.3Visuo-gestural level: Gesture production and gaze behavior
- III.Qualitative analyses
- 3.1Overview of Communication Management in the two situations
- 3.2The case of tongue clicks: Blending vocal and kinetic behaviors
- 3.3Embodied displays of intersubjectivity in storytelling: The interactive dimension of fluencemes
- 3.4The interplay of vocal and material resources in the course of class presentations
- IV.Discussion
- 4.1Effect of style and setting on fluency and gesture
- 4.1.1Beyond the degree of preparation or mode of delivery
- 4.1.2Fluenceme rate, distribution, and patterns of co-occurrence across the two situations
- 4.1.3Gestural distribution and gaze behavior
- 4.2The importance of audience design
- 4.2.1Discourse identities within complex participation frameworks
- 4.2.2Class presentations and the presenters’ orientation to their talk
- Conclusion to the chapter
-
Notes