This article discusses three important issues to be considered for the cognitive science of hearers' behaviors. First, I emphasize the distinction between a hearer of an utterance and a recipient of a telling, both of which are referred to as kikite in Japanese. For the former, reactions that occur during the speaker's utterance or that express the understanding of it are the central target of the study, while the latter mainly concerns actions that facilitate the production of larger materials. Second, I connect this distinction to variety in the ways of the progress of conversation. At least, two types of manners can be distinguished: the turn-by-turn type and the telling type. They affect possible actions that hearers/recipients engaged in a conversation can take. Third, I describe different roles that hearers of an utterance play in regard to the speaker's addressing of that utterance. I demonstrate how hearers' nonverbal behaviors can vary depending on their hearer roles. These three concepts should be taken into account to achieve more comprehensive understanding of hearers' behaviors in conversation.

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The existence of “adjacency pairs” is one of the major discoveries by the founders of conversation analysis. In the present paper, I revisit the adjacency pair, and in particular the underpinning concept of conditional relevance (Schegloff, 1968), through examining the analyses presented in the articles in the March 2009 special issue that focus on the multimodality of interaction. In addition to the fact that these articles are indicative of the usability of conditional relevance in analyzing various multimodal interactional settings, I will discuss the fact that conditional relevance can become effective not only upon the completion of the first pair part of an adjacency pair (FPP) but also before the production of the FPP. Furthermore, through analyzing child-caregiver interactions from my own data, where adjacency pair operates as the machinery for organizing a complex participation framework of interactional moments involving a young child and a preverbal infant, I will argue that the adjacency pair is the primordial engine for organizing human interaction.

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In this paper we are concerned with how we take one of possible perspectives to observe our talk-in-interaction. Most studies of conversational analysis take microscopic view to conversational transcription data as a trace of the interactions. With the perspective, little is known about conversational dynamics that we feel a responsibility to respond to others when we are greeted. The attempt to build sociable robots provides us with a novel perspective on social interaction.
In studies of interactional organizations with social robots, we focus on a kind of action-perception cycle that we call “entrusting behavior” and “grounding” from the internal perspective of the robot. Our researches stress the way in which robots in the social field could, in a sense, be conscious of the indeterminacy of their actions' meanings. In the paper, several trials relating to how observe the interaction dynamics from internal view of social robots are discussed.

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This paper discusses the present special issue on “Communication Viewed from Hearers' Behaviors,” focusing on Erving Goffman's participation framework and gestural phenomena observed in conversation. In particular, it points out the possibility to conceive of speaker as a) a hearer, b) a receiver of the information, as well as c) an addressee. It also points out that grand gesture and simultaneous gestural matching can be loci of analysis in understanding how social-interactional plain and cognitive plain interact in investigatory conversation between the suspect and the policemen and⁄or prosecutory officials, and in psychological counseling.

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Hosoma (2009) and Joh & Hosoma (2009) presented a new approach for conversation analysis over the speaker-hearer framework in order to expand the previous framework of gesture studies in which generation of speech and gesture in a speaker was mainly discussed (McNeill, 1992; Saito & Kita, 2002). We suggest a guideline for the new conversation analysis to serve as a promising research field that bridges the speech and gesture studies between speaker and hearer. The guideline consisted of two main suggestions in order to reconsider the speaker-hearer framework from a viewpoint of the bilateral character of human nature. The fist is to construct a theory in the new conversation analysis. The recommended task is to examine critical words such as “synchronization”of speech and gesture, and “spontaneous” gesture used in the speaker oriented gesture studies. The second is to consult related research areas such as brain science and sports science in order to share the benefits of using of measurement hardware such as brain imaging. Taken together, conversation and gesture studies will lead to interesting new findings coming from the cooperation among various studies.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the action observation changes the learner's leg stiffness, representing mechanical state of global leg spring, during drop jump (DJ) and whether the process to observe the learner's and model's movement is effective method. We used the drop jump as trial movement, since its performance is influenced by the change in leg stiffness. 21 subjects we employed were divided into 3 groups (GPs) according to the observation type-GP1: observation of both the model's and their own DJ; GP2: observation of only the model's DJ; GP3: no observation with rest. The subjects performed DJ pre and post observation. Leg stiffness was estimated using the leg length (240 fps) and vertical ground reaction force (Fz) (2000 Hz) during stance phase and compared between pre- and post-tests in each group. In GP1, kinetic (the leg stiffness and maximum value of Fz) and kinematic (i.e., contact duration and change in leg compression) parameters in posttest were significantly higher and lesser than that in pretest, respectively. The results indicate that the leg stiffness is increased by the action observation and thus the observation procedure is effective to enhance the DJ skill that utilizes the external force. Further, the results suggest that observing learner's own and model's movements is to enhance the effect of action observation.

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