Identifying units in interaction: Reactive tokens in Korean and English conversations

Abstract

Reactive tokens are conversational resources by which a listener co-constructs a speaker's turn at talk. The resources that are available include the forms of the reactive tokens themselves, their duration, and their placement by the listener in the current speaker's turn. The present paper is a contrastive study of the use of these resources by Americans in English, and by Koreans in their native language and in English, and in it we show the ecological relationship between the resources that a language provides and their use in constructing active listenership. Although previous research on English has found listeners use reactive tokens to pass up the opportunity for a full turn at talk, we show that, in Korean, reactive tokens are often elicited by the current speaker and the listener is obligated to provide them. We present evidence that Korean bilinguals transfer some conversational resources from their native language when they take part in conversation in English.

How do analogizing and mental simulation influence team dynamics in innovative product design?

“…More recent evidence, however, supports a functional role for confirmatory utterances, whereby they designate a listener's comprehension (e.g., Wolf, 2008) and facilitate idea generation (e.g., Sannomiya et al, 2003), although we concede that these two studies were restricted to Japanese speakers, such that the extension of these findings to Western speakers remains unsupported at present. Nevertheless, we also note that the concept of backchannel responses has now broadened beyond a focus on simple, nonlexical, vocalized sounds (e.g., “mm-hm” and “uh-huh”) to include brief phrases or statements (e.g., “really” and “is that so?”) and even substantive requests for clarification or repetition (e.g., Young & Lee, 2004).…”

La contribución del oyente a la interacción oral en Español como Lengua Extranjera: Un estudio comparativo

“…Se piensa que esta habilidad se va desarrollando en los interlocutores nativos gracias, entre otros factores, a la participación en un gran número de conversaciones. La participación en un mayor número de conversaciones en L2 también facilita en el oyente la proyección de los LTP (Young & Lee, 2004); lo cual determina que los alumnos de mayor nivel, gracias a una mayor participación en conversaciones en L2, hayan adquirido mejor la proyección de los LTP y, por lo tanto, sean capaces de producir un mayor número de TA.…”

Listening behaviors in Japanese

“…Besides the terms backchannel and aizuchi, the term reactive token (RT) was proposed by Clancy, Thompson, Suzuki, and Tao (1996) and is used by other researchers (Furo, 2000;Miyazaki, 2005;Young & Lee, 2004). Clancy et al define RT as "a short utterance produced by an interlocutor who is playing a listener's role during the other interlocutor's speakership" (p. 356), and they list five different subcategories of RT:…”

“…Besides PPUs, transition relevance places (TRPs) and complex transition relevance places (CTRPs), which is an extended concept of TRP, were used in previous studies (Clancy et al, 1996;Young & Lee, 2004). The use of CTRPs broadens the idea of boundary to grammatical completion, intonational completion, and pragmatic completion,…”

“…Although fewer in number than the studies on aizuchi, some researchers examined English native speakers' backchannels in terms of frequency, types, function, and location. The analyses in the previous studies were mainly qualitative, and frequency was the focus when comparisons were made cross-linguistically with Japanese (Clancy et al, 1996;Maynard, 1993;Ohama, 2006), Chinese (Clancy et al, 1996), and Korean (Young & Lee, 2004).…”