Handling Turn Transitions in Australian Tactile Signed Conversations

ABSTRACT

This article explores how deafblind Australian Sign Language (Auslan) users, who communicate through an alternative range of modalities including tactile (hands) and kinetic (body movement) inputs, manage turn transitions. Studies of deafblind communication have typically employed a signal-based approach. In contrast, this article applies broader Conversational Analysis (CA) frameworks, which have been developed based on interlocutors who primarily rely on auditory-vocal and visual resources but have been productively applied to a range of languages, participants, and settings. Through fine-grained analyses of a single case study, this article examines how tactile Auslan signers orient to the relevance of turn transitions at possible completion points. The research illuminates the mechanics of how tactile Auslan signers negotiate turns and advances our understanding of both the analytical potentials of CA and the ways particular deafblind Auslan signers coordinate sequences, actions, and multimodalities in their interactional choreography. Data are in tactile Auslan.

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Supplementary Material

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Notes

¹ Within the relatively new field of research and interpreting practice, “tactile sign language” or “tactile [sign language name]” is commonly used to refer to a form of signing used by deafblind people, regardless of degree of codification. Issues surrounding notions of tactile sign languages are discussed further in Willoughby et al. (2018).

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

² CA principles established that “[o]verwhelmingly one speaker talks at a time. Occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are common but brief. […] Transition (from one turn to the next) with no gap and no overlap are common,” and together with “slight gap and slight overlap, they make up the vast majority of transitions” (Sacks et al., 1974, pp. 700–701).

³ Conversational levels or clear movement on the horizontal plane to indicate turn transition have not been corroborated in other tactile signing studies. For example, Raanes (2011) notes that hesitation in tactile Norwegian Sign Language can be indicated by raising the height at which signs are produced, but other features of Mesch’s turn zones and levels were not identified.

⁴ Deafblind people can use various communication modes, depending on their vision and hearing loss, antecedents, and education. A number of modes exist, which can be used singly or in combination: tactile sign language, short distance sign language, tactile speech reading (Tadoma method; Tactiling), fingerspelling (each alphabetic letter is represented by a single sign to collectively make up a word) and writing in the hand; print-on-palm; braille and finger-braille.

⁵ For example, tactile sign languages have been explored in American Sign Language (Collins & Petronio, 1998; Edwards, 2012, 2014a, 2014b; Haas et al., 1995; Petronio & Dively, 2006; Quinto-Pozos, 2002; Reed et al., 1990, 1995), Swedish Sign Language (Mesch, 2000, 2001, 2013; Mesch et al., 2015), Norwegian Sign Language (Berge & Raanes, 2013; Raanes, 2011; Raanes & Berge, 2017), French Sign Language (Schwartz, 2004, 2008), Sign Language of the Netherlands (Balder et al., 2000), Italian Sign Language (Checchetto et al., 2018), and Australian Sign Language (Iwasaki et al., 2019; Willoughby et al., 2014, 2018, 2019, 2020).

⁶ Per interviews with participants and interpreters, tactile Auslan interlocutors use the terms “talk,” “tell,” and “say” to describe their sign language use.

⁷ Strategies for haptic perception have been confirmed through interviews with tactile signers and interpreters within the larger study.

⁸ This is different from other contexts (e.g., tactile ASL), where one-handed reception is preferred (Collins & Petronio, 1998; Edwards, 2014b; Mesch, 2001, 2013).

⁹ The data used for this study are taken from a larger project funded by the Australian Research Council (DP160100142). Our data collection includes 21 deafblind-deafblind conversations of approximately 26 hours of recordings. The research was conducted under Ethics application (Project number: CF11/1105-2011000583) including consent from all participants.

¹⁰ Mesch (2001, pp. 92–96) notes that tactile signers with different dominant hands may change hands from monologue position (i.e., both the signer’s hands are held under the interlocutor’s hands) to dialogue position (i.e., each signer places their nondominant hand on top of the dominant hand of their interlocutor) to take the turn. However, she reports that tactile sign interlocutors with mixed dominant hands can coordinate turn-taking without friction.

¹¹ Of the 99 speaker changes observed in the data set, 41 were signer initiated. Within the signer-initiated turns 32 (or 78%) were achieved with both hands, and 90% of these occurred at the TRP. Of the 99 speaker changes observed in the data set, 56 were recipient initiated. Within the recipient-initiated turns 36 (or 64%) were achieved stepwise, and 50% of these occurred at the TRP.

¹² See note 7 and Willoughby et al. (2020) and Manns et al. (2022).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the Australian Research Council under ARC Discovery Project [DP160100142].