Theoretical Background
We will analyze the reactions to the muted communication partner as a form of “repair initiation”. Schegloff (2000, 207) defines a repair as the practice of “dealing with problems or troubles in speaking, hearing, and understanding the talk in conversation”. A repair initiation, then, is the marking of this trouble after it occurred; it can be done either by the speaker of the problematic message themselves (self-initiation) or by its recipient (other-initiation) (Schegloff 2000, 208). The following is a typical example of a situation in which a repair initiation might be warranted:
In the case of our research, we are looking at a rather extreme case of "problem source". You are completely unable to hear the muted person. The person bringing this to the attention of the muted speaker then does the repair initiation which we are interested in. Hence we will analyse the different strategies people use to initiate repair.
There has been extensive academic research into cross-cultural differences in repair initiation. Scholarship hitherto conducted suggests that, compared to most Western countries, Chinese native speakers are more hesitant to do direct, other-initiated repair. For example, Quan and Weisser (2015, 39) demonstrated that Chinese native speakers prefer self-initiation of repair over other-initiation. This preference can also explain the findings of Wong (2000, 245) who showed that Chinese tend to delay the repair initiation compared to English native speakers. If you prefer self-initiation of repair, it makes sense that you may also wait longer for the first speaker to repair themselves, rather than initiating the repair from outside.
Essentially, an other-initiation of repair is a request for clarification of the previous speech (Dingemanse, Blythe, and Dirskmeyer 2014, 5). This is why we also take a look at the literature on cultural differences in the speech act of requesting. Compared to most Western countries, Chinese requests usually are a bit more complex and contain more strategies to acknowledge the face-threat that the request constitutes (Chang and Hsu 1998, 130). Examples of such "face work" can be usage of address terms and names, inclusion of mitigating lexical certainty modifiers (e.g. "not really" instead of "not"), and including words like "sorry" (Chang and Hsu 1998, 129). Other studies also found that facial expressions, such as smiling, can be used to make a speech act less face-threatening (Brunet et al 2012; Martin et al 2017).
In conclusion, the literature makes us expect faster and more direct repair initiation from Dutch people compared to the Chinese native speakers. In our experiments we will test empirically whether these claims also hold in the new type of video call communication.