Dans le cadre du séminaire de Master « Linguistique de corpus – dimension pragmatique » donné par Jérôme Jacquin
Christoph Rühlemann (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) est une figure incontournable de la pragmatique contemporaine. Il est notamment reconnu pour sa contribution déterminante au développement de la 'Corpus Pragmatics' (Pragmatique de corpus), dont l'objectif est d'appliquer les méthodes mixtes inspirées de la linguistique de corpus à des questionnements pragmatiques. Articulant méthodes statistiques et linguistique interactionnelle, il s’intéresse à de nombreux sujets et terrains d'investigation, notamment les marqueurs discursifs, les déictiques, les actes de langages, ou encore l’organisation de la conversation. Ses recherches intègrent régulièrement la dimension multimodale du langage, notamment par la prise en compte de la direction du regard ou des gestes cooccurrents. Pour sa conférence, il propose d’aborder la très classique et toutefois toujours très délicate question de l’alternance des locuteurs-trices dans l’interaction: qui est invité à parler à quel moment? En quoi la pupillométrie peut-elle nous offrir un éclairage pertinent sur cette problématique?
Toute personne intéressée est très chaleureusement invitée à nous rejoindre.
Conference summary :
Next-speaker selection is a fundamental concept in studies of turn-taking in mundane conversation, referring to the practices and mechanisms that speakers in a conversation use to determine who should speak next. While the concept is central in Conversation Analysis and related disciplines, little is known about the cognitive repercussions of next-speaker selection in selected and not-selected participants.
In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by drawing not only on turn-taking data but also on pupillometric data. The study focuses on questions in triadic interaction. Questions can initiate two types of next-speaker selection: open-floor questions, as in Where do you guys come from?, facilitate inclusive next-speaker selection, addressing more than a single participant and giving license to more than one participant to respond, whereas closed-floor questions, as in You come from Nigeria too?, enact exclusive next-speaker selection, addressing a single participant and licensing only that addressed participant to answer.
We compare pupil sizes of participants that answer and those of participants that do not answer the question in open-floor questions initiating inclusive selection and, respectively, closed-floor question initiating exclusive selection.
The results of a mixed-effects model confirm that, while answerers’ pupils dilate around the transition from question to answer whatever the question type, not-answerers’ pupils dilate in inclusive questions but constrict in exclusive questions. We take this finding as evidence that in question-answer sequences where a single participant is called upon to answer the question, the cognitive effort in the not-selected and not-answering participant is momentarily relaxed, as they do not prepare a response turn, whereas in sequences where both question recipients can legitimately answer the question, processing load momentarily increases in both question recipients, as both engage in speech planning.
Overall, this study breaks new ground in that it uses pupillometry in unconstrained conversation rather than experimental conditions, extends the enquiry into speech processing from dyads to multi-party conversation, and suggests that conversational interactants cognitively respond to next-speaker selection, impacting not only their displayed behavior in interaction but also their (largely covert) mental processes.