One Signer at a Time? A Corpus Study of Turn-Taking Patterns in Signed Dialogue

EasyChair Preprint 10675

Abstract

It is not contentious that spoken dialogue is organised as a rapid exchange of turns with very minimal gap or overlap; underpinned by the real-time and highly predictive nature of human language processing. By contrast, research on patterns and mechanisms of turn taking in signed interaction is very scarce, to the extent that there isn’t even broad consensus on whether signed dialogue is best characterised under a one-signer-at-a-time model. In this paper, we present a preliminary corpus study of turn-taking patterns in signed dialogue in British Sign Language (BSL) using the BSL Corpus Project. Our results are broadly compatible with one-at-a-time signing, albeit obscured by non-semantic signer movements. However, we also identify examples that do not fit this model which require further study.

Keyphrases: BSL, British Sign Language, corpus study, interaction, signed dialogue, turn-taking

@booklet{EasyChair:10675,
  author    = {Dan Green and Arash Eshghi},
  title     = {One Signer at a Time? A Corpus Study of Turn-Taking Patterns in Signed Dialogue},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 10675},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2023}}