Speech Units Workshop

Documenting interaction patterns in adults and children across linguistically and culturally diverse populations could be a challenging task that often requires a comparable and naturalistic-like interaction setting. Additionally, there are certain challenges associated with collecting such data in field conditions.

Coordination games offer an entertaining solution to eliciting dialogue data under controlled conditions. In this workshop, I will share the experience of collecting interaction data with a director-matcher task in three study locations (Vietnam, Switzerland, and Peru). The director-matcher paradigm allows experimenters to control for a variety of communicative settings, ranging from naturalistic-like face-to-face interactions to less- or non-interactive conditions. This talk will provide a methodological overview of setting up such experiments with adults and young children in the field. Additionally, we will discuss the applications of such data for cross-linguistic and language acquisition studies on the universal patterns of human interaction, including turn-taking, repairs, audience design, as well as establishing and maintaining communicative alignment.