Exploring sequences of speech and laughter activity using visualisations of conversations

In this study, we analysed laughter in dyadic conversational interaction. We attempted to categorise patterns of speaking and laughing activity in conversation in order to gain more insight into how speaking and laughing are timed and related to each other. Special attention was paid to a particular sequencing of speech and laughter activity that is intended to invite an interlocutor to laugh (i.e. ‘invitation-acceptance’ scheme): the speaker invites the listener to laugh by producing a laugh after his/her own utterance, indicating that it is appropriate to laugh. We explored these kinds of sequences through visualisations of speech and laughter activity in conversations. Based on manual transcriptions of the HCRC Map Task corpus, we generated visualisations of speech and laughter activity. Using these visualisations, we found that people indeed show a tendency to adhere to the ‘invitation-acceptance’ scheme and that people tend to ‘wait’ to be invited to a shared laughter event rather than to ‘anticipate’ it. These speech-and-laugh-activity plots have shown to be helpful in analysing the interplay between laughing and speaking in conversation and can be used as a tool to enhance the researcher’s intuition on underresearched fields.