When a telling is properly initiated in talk-in-interaction, recipients are expected to align with the telling by withholding their utterances. As previous studies have noted, however, recipients actually produce a variety of utterances in mid-telling. Focusing on a previously undescribed class of such utterances, this paper describes how they are used to facilitate progress of telling. Starting with basic recipients' responses used to align with telling, I describe three recipient's methods for facilitating progress of telling: sustaining, prompting and promoting continuation. I also show that these methods are used so as to maximize the possibility of teller's self-continuation. In conclusion, I argue that in facilitating a telling, recipients' orientation to progressivity of the telling is stronger than their orientation to entitlement of the teller, and the latter is relaxed step by step until continuation is achieved.

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The present research brings insight into listener's responses in psychotherapeutic counseling and advice sessions, as well as temporal changes in these responses. Four 50-minute counseling sessions were analyzed, of which two were negatively evaluated and two were positively evaluated (high evaluation counseling). In addition, two 50-minute ordinary advice sessions between two high school teachers and the clients from the high evaluation group were analyzed. All sessions represented role-playing. Three judges labeled the listeners' utterances into (a) utterances starting with an answer to the speaker's questions, (b) utterances starting with back-channels, (c) utterances starting with laughter, and (d) others. The results indicated that (a) and (c) are rather rare in counseling, and (b) occurs at a higher rate in counseling, as compared to advise sessions. Further, the occurrence of (b) and (d) in the two high evaluation counseling cases showed a similar time-series pattern, and this pattern corresponded to the time-series pattern of body movement synchrony. This pattern suggested a temporal structure in counseling sessions, that involves processes of counselor's understanding of the client and the client's changes.

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The effects of facilitating mutual interactions and objective evaluations on the member satisfaction in collaborative problem solving were investigated. In Study 1, satisfaction of collaborating members was factor analyzed. Results indicated that satisfaction consisted of three factors: Task performance, Sense of unity with other members, and Positive changes in cognition. In Study 2, we used two tasks, a well-defined task and an ill-defined task, to experimentally identify the types of interactive behaviors that affected satisfaction. Satisfaction was effected by performance-oriented behavior, maintenance-oriented behavior, and objective evaluation. In the well-defined task, satisfaction was particularly effected by performance-oriented behaviors and objective evaluation, whereas in the ill-defined task, it was particularly effected by maintenance-oriented behaviors.

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Formal linguistics places an idealized speaker-hearer at the center of human language (Chomsky 1965; Saussure 1966). Hearers, who are largely though not completely silent, are however, given very little attenion. Most analysis of language, including the study of talk-in-interaction, focuses almost exclusively on phenomena embedded within the stream of speech including linguistic structure, turn-constructional units, and prosody. However, within face-to-face interaction hearers use the visible organization of their bodies to display consequential participation in the talk of the moment. Speakers change the structure of emerging utterances in response to what they see their hearers doing. Hearers are thus central to the constitution of utterances, sentences, and the states of talk within which these structures emerge. Building an utterance is not only a multi-party activity, but also one constructed through the mutual elaboration of structurally different kinds of semiotic phenomena, including both the talk of the speaker, and the embodied displays of the hearer(s). How participants attend to the observability and display of each other's bodies in copresence as consequential for the collaborative organization of action is one of the central issues posed in the analysis of the relationship between interaction, language, and cognition. Such phenomena will be investigated here through analysis of a video-recording of a little girl trying to read a recipe as she makes cookies with her aunt. Within this sequence human action and cognition are organized through the ongoing construction and transformation of unfolding environments within which language structure, the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction, the participants' bodies, and features of the material surround mutually elaborate each other to create meaningful configurations of action and meaning that go beyond any of their component parts.

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In the Conversation Analytic tradition, one has noted and discussed the substantial contribution of hearers' conduct to the constitution of each utterance in conversation, in ways very sensitive to some prominent sequential positions in interaction such as a possible completion point of an utterance. In this article, I focus on the spatial distribution of orientations which all the participants in interaction show in and through their bodily arrangement. The spatial distribution of participants' orientations constitutes, and is incorporated into, a distinct and describable activity. One should note, however, that the organization of a distinct activity with a distinct distribution of orientations is still embedded in the sequential order of interaction. I show that various context-free, general resources are available in interaction for participants to organize the current, on-going activity sequentially and jointly in and through the actual development of interaction.

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This paper considers how people gain particular participant's orientation in multiparty settings, and explicates its structural features. For that purpose, we did videotape and examine naturally occurring interactions between elderly visitors and care workers within nursing care home for elderly.
We analyze how interaction is initiated between elderly visitors and care workers, and how interaction is coordinated between them. In relation to this, Schegloff (2002=2003) and Heath (1984) discussed actions as a pre-initiating activity. Heath (1984) made a definition of it: ‘...whereas a display of availability serves as a pre-initiating activity providing an environment for the occurrence of a range of actions...’(Heath, 1984: 250).
In particular, we focus on cases in which a care worker is not displaying availability to an elderly visitor who want to talk to this care worker. In such a situation, an elderly visitor does extra work in order to gain the care worker's availability. Then, When do an elderly visitor gain the care worker's availability? As a result, a care worker's utterance and behavior that suggests possibility of disengagement from participant framework by then are very useful resource for an elderly visitor who want to gain the care worker's availability.

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This paper considers examples of gestures enacted by the first speaker in an adjacency pair and a post-expansion. In these simple examples, the gesture continued until the first speaker enacted the sequence-closing third. In examples illustrating the organization of dispreference, the time structure of the gestures is coordinated with the utterances of both first and second speakers: prolonged gestures by the first speaker are delayed, mitigated, or elaborated according to the structure of the second pair. When preferred responses are elaborated and rendered more complex, gestures can be elaborated according to the structure of the responses. We discuss the properties of a grand gesture, which is produced by an utterance of one party and continued over multiple turns, in order to reconsider the speaker-hearer framework.

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How do participants in multi-party conversations project and coordinate the timing and content of their gestures when such gestures are exchanged simultaneously? This paper considers examples of the Simultaneous Gestural Matching (SGM) of spontaneous gestures to examine gestural coordination during conversation. Detailed analyses show that (1) the first utterance of an adjacent pair projects the timing and content of the subsequent gesture; (2) the first recipient initiates a gesture unit or a phrase to respond to the first part of the pair; (3) the other recipients provide gestures that synchronize with the gesture of the first recipient; (4) the parties focus their eye movements on monitoring the gestures made by other participants; (5) the parties control the micro-timing of the gesture phases in the gesture unit or the phrase; and (6) the entire SGM process enables differences in gestures to reveal differences among the parties in terms of their knowledge about the topic. We constructed a simple model of SGM for purposes of further discussion.

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The present commentary discussed the emergence of symmetry as a pivotal behavior in linguistic, communicative and cognitive functions. Symmetry was defined as bidirectional stimulus-stimulus relationships (if AB then BA) in the stimulus equivalence which included transitivity and reversed transitivity (equivalence). First, the theoretical framework of symmetry and stimulus equivalence was presented from the point of conceptional, experimental and applied analysis of behavior. Second, the experimental researches by human and non-human were reviewed. The data suggested that humans in younger ages and with severe developmental disabilities established symmetry, though non-human animals did not show it in the usual method. In theoretical sense, symmetry and exclusion would be necessary for one-to-one correspondence between word and event as a basis of cognitive development. Third, I analyzed symmetry in linguistic and communicative function; comprehension⁄production, expression⁄reception, speaker-behavior⁄listener-behavior, initiating joint attention⁄responsive joint attention, imitation⁄counter imitation, and turn-taking (role-change) behavior. Fourth, symmetry could be applied as an important framework for speech and language therapy and learning and developmental intervention of reading and writing skills. Finally, issues of stimulus equivalence, verbal behavior and inner event were discussed in human development and cognitive⁄behavior therapy.

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When we teach children a novel word by pointing to an object, we expect them not only to become able to say the word when they see the object again, but also to become able to remember the object just by hearing the word. Inferring the new relation “if you hear the NAME then remember the OBJECT” based on the learned relation “if you see the OBJECT then say the NAME” is called symmetry and it has been reported that non-human animals rarely show this ability. However the matching-to-sample procedures used to examine whether non-human animals have this ability seem to have problems as a method to test the above-mentioned ability that is involved in learning and using words. Still, human adults show symmetry even when tested by using such a problematic procedure, whereas human infants rarely show symmetry in this task. Based on these facts, the relationship between language use and the emergence of symmetry was discussed.

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Although “symmetry in language” may be related to the origin of the language, many linguists do not seem to show interest in this problem. Why do linguists not show interest in symmetry? There seem to be at least three reasons. (1) Concerning “reference”, there have been many disputes in the philosophy of language. Nowadays, more complex problems than symmetry attract researchers in the field of semantics. (2) Saussure pointed out that the system of language does not concern the symmetry between “thing and name”. (3) For linguists, a more important research theme is the elucidation of the relationships between the elements inside the language structure.

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The present article is a comment on the feature “Symmetry: The search for the foundation of thinking, language, and communication” apppeared on Congnitive Studies, 15(3), 2008, from a viewpoint of experimental psychology on the fields of learning and thinking studies. It includes discussion on the biological significance of the experiments both with animal and human, and show the asymmetry of human and animal are not only due to the difference of the biological significance of the experimental situations with referencing data on the retrospective revaluation experiment with human participants. After the discussion, the possibility that the fundamental factor that separates human from infrahuman is the self-concept and self-consciousness is indicated. And in conducting comparative studies on cognitive mechanism and ability, the construction of the model of the self on non-human, such as computer, will be inevitably needed.

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We discussed symmetry from the viewpoint of form and structure of knowledge representation. First we proposed a hypothesis that explains why nonhuman animals do not exhibit symmetry while humans exhibit symmetry. According to the proposed hypothesis, non-human animals form procedural knowledge where an object (the comparison item) and an action are tightly coupled by knowledge compilation through repetitive training. It prevents them from recognizing the object separate from the action so that non-human animals do not recognize the object as the sample stimulus of the inverted task. Therefore the animal does not exhibit symmetry. In contrast, humans make use of verbal description of the training situation. It prompts them to separate the action and the objects, so that the object is easily recognized as the sample of the inverted task. Second we discussed the problem of similarity in reasoning. Many studies showing human symmetric reasoning presume that the truth value of a proposition is either true or false. However we do not always treat a proposition in such a dichotomous way. In such cases, similarity plays important roles. It is well known that similarity is asymmetric and that similarity is computed based on structured representation. We pointed that these two properties of similarity are crucial for understanding human symmetric as well as asymmetric reasoning.

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Symmetry bias has been discussed often in the context of one on one relationship, that is the relationship between name and object. This paper presents other possibilities from the viewpoint of predicate logic, especially, in the usage of the Skolem function. In this paper, from the present viewpoint, a few types of new symmetry bias are provided. Section 2 introduces symmetry bias between subject and object, and symmetry bias of the Skolem function between antecedent and consequent in conditions.In section 3, a new type of symmetry bias between name and object is clarified from the standpoint of predicate logic and the cognitive mechanism. In section 5, first, an intentional predicate logic is defined, then possibilities of new symmetry bias are examined, depending on the intentional predicate logic.The final section discusses a particular predicate logic form which contains all the above mentioned cases of symmetry bias, based on a concrete story.

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It is known that most other animals than humans are unable to pass the symmetry test. Some authors of the Cognitive Studies, 15(3), pointed out that the arbitrary matching to sample task, a standard test for the symmetry, includes a time sequence of stimuli, which may cause a difficulty in reversing the relation between the sample stimuli and the comparison stimuli, and in passing the test. Moreover, the task requires ability to actively select a stimulus, which also may cause the difficulty. This paper hence proposes a simple test for symmetry which excludes additional obstacles in the test such as the time order between the stimuli, and also excludes the action of selection.

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