Timing and Prosody of Lexical Repetition: How Repeated Instructions Assist Visually Impaired Athletes’ Navigation in Sport Climbing

ABSTRACT

How can lexical repetition help in guiding someone to do something? We take the example of sports climbing. Climbing demands complex bodily movements to reach holds and propel the body upwards. It is harder for visually impaired athletes, since they cannot see in advance where holds are located, so guides help them. There is a great deal of interplay between the (a) affordances of the climbing wall; (b) the guides’ understanding of what the climbers are touching; and (c) the formatting, timing, and delivery of their instructions. We find that guides use carefully timed and prosodically calibrated lexical repetition (for example, up up up!) to adjust both the duration and direction of the climbers’ ongoing movements and to make sure that they get to their planned holds. Data are in Italian with English translation.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹Further evidence in this direction is provided by Baldauf-Quilliatre (2015) and, more recently, Baldauf-Quilliatre & de Carvajal, 2020) drawing on data from multiplayer videogaming. In their data, participants uttered repeated “vague” directives (not addressing a specific action to be undertaken) to encourage the recipient to continue current game action.

²The variation between selecting the component that conveys movement’s extension (“stretched”) or direction (“eleven”) is shown particularly in the analyses of Extracts 10 and 14.

³Note that in Extract 5 the guide verbally locates the next foothold with reference to the climber’s body. Conversely, in Extract 4, she uses a clock position (line 1: “eleven”) to verbally locate the next handhold. Both systems (reference to the recipient’s body and clock positions) are meant to provide accessible directions that the visually impaired climbers can interpret based on proprioception (cf. Simone & Galatolo, 2020).

⁴Overall, in the paraclimbing corpus, instruction sequences are mostly followed by postcompletion validation, routinely in the form of demonstrative (e.g., “that’s it”) or locative expressions (e.g.,“there it is”) conveying that the hold the climber has just reached is the target. This also happens in most cases, as in Extract 6, where the guide calibrates the climber’s movement with repetitions (25 out of 38 sequences, about 66%). However, lack of overt validation is not infrequent (13 out of 38 sequences, about 34%). Although we are not able to systematically identify the circumstances leading to lack of overt validation, we have evidence that the end of the repetitions plays a prominent role in signaling to the climber that the target hold has been reached and the action can be finalized, as in Extract 7 and in the following Extracts 10 and 11.

⁵In this case, toward the end of the repetition, the climber leans shortly on a hold placed just below the correct one (line 5; Figure 5). The repetition is stopped, and a corrective instruction is immediately uttered by the guide (line 4: “one more up?”). Interestingly, the climber’s response occurs very early with respect to the correction, as he opens his hip and resumes lifting of the foot already at the beginning of the guide’s corrective instruction (line 5; Figure 6). This suggests that the quick leaning on the nontarget hold was possibly motivated by having almost reached the maximum range of his movement, rather than by having failed to understand what the repetition conveyed.

⁶The climb is suspended since the guide goes to the gym staff and asks them to turn down the music as the volume is too loud to communicate with the climber.

⁷Numbering of the lines is brought back to 1 as this transcript, unlike the previous one, contains more detailed multimodal transcription lines.

⁸A quickdraw is a piece of climbing equipment attached to a bolt that allows the safety rope to pass through.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.