Looking for Laughs: Gaze Interaction with Laughter Pragmatics and Coordination

A Longitudinal Characterization of Typical Laughter Development in Mother–Child Interaction from 12 to 36 Months: Formal Features and Reciprocal Responsiveness

“…[McNemar's χ 2 = 16.488, df = 1, p < .0001]. This piece of data supports the view that multimodal and verbal non-linguistic elements contribute to the construction of meaning and are tightly linked to the social action performed (Bavelas & Chovil, 2000;Mazzocconi et al, 2021;Trujillo & Holler, 2021) since the early stages of development.…”

“…This is a generalization that has already been observed in adults. This suggests that multi-modal, verbal, and para-linguistic, elements contribute to the construction of meaning and are tightly linked to the social action performed (Bavelas & Chovil, 2000;Mazzocconi et al, 2021;Trujillo & Holler, 2021) since the very early stages of development. As far as mothers' laughter behavior goes, we observe interesting similarities (duration, arousal, speech-laughter use) and differences (lower frequency overall and higher laughter mimicry during the child's second year) in comparison with data from adult-adult interaction.…”

Laughter Meaning Construction and Use in Development: Children and Spoken Dialogue Systems

“…Moreover, it has been observed that gaze is an important cue exploited by interactants when reciprocating laughter, similarly to what can be observed in speech-turn taking [6,87]. Those data stress therefore the importance of integrating laughter and gaze for modelling of meaning construction and coordination in interaction, especially highlighting how the combined consideration of different modalities can help in the respective interpretation and classification, and even prediction when desirable [69].…”

“…In the same attempt to characterise different laughter uses, [69] investigates whether laughs performing different pragmatic functions would be accompanied by different gaze patterns at the interlocutor. A multimodal corpus of dialogical interactions is analysed [92] in order to conduct an event-related analysis centered around laughter onset and offset from both participants.…”

“…In order to compensate for the lack of structured insights about laughter development, a longitudinal observation of laughter behaviour in four typically developing (North-American English) children in interaction with their mothers from 12 to 36 months of age has been conducted [67,66] (Providence Corpus, [25]) using the multi-layered framework proposed in [71]. Significant changes over time have been observed both in laughter use (in terms of frequency, laughable and function) and in behaviour in response to the partner's laughter both in children and mothers, mirroring the neuro-psychological development of the child on different levels (especially linguistic, pragmatic and attentional) and the mother's attunement to it [67,66].…”