Language and Movement Lab
Studying Multimodality in Human Interaction
About LaMoLa
The Freiburg Language & Movement Laboratory (LaMoLa) provides a forum for embodied interaction research activities in Linguistics, Psychosomatics, Psychology and Sport Sciences at the University of Freiburg, providing up-to-date information on projects, people, and methodology.
Studying the micro-processes of talking and moving in everyday leisure, workplace and clinical encounters will deepen our understanding of rapport negotiation and intersubjective dynamics in human interaction. Our aim is to transcend the tradition of discipline-based research fragmentation of coordination phenomena into their linguistic, bodily or interpersonal aspects. Instead, we will come together to study such phenomena in an interdisciplinary way, combining methodological expertise in video-recording, motion capture & motion tracking, transcribing the spoken words, and multimodally anlyzing talk-in-interaction.
Projects and Resources
Talking & walking
Laboratory research suggested bidirectional links between walking synchrony and emotional congruency when walking side by side. In this project we investigate in natural settings how conversational content shapes walking synchrony when walking together. During leisure walks participants engage in conversations. We analyze the varying degree of walking synchrony throughout the course of the walks via a mobile motion tracking system. Participants’ conversations are voice recorded, transcribed, and coded for motivational tendencies (e.g. consensual phases vs. phases of disagreement) and cognitive structures (e.g. complex arguments vs. small talk). By integrating both data sets in a time-locked manner we analyze bidirectional influences between walking synchrony and conversational dynamics.
Principal Investigators
Prof. Dr. Roland Thomaschke; Prof. Dr. Andrea Kiesel, Prof. Dr. Dominic Gehring
Contact
Website - Roland Thomaschke
Website - Andrea Kiesel
Out of synch
Vocal manipulation of human motor control
To move and interact with the environment, complex processes involving sensory, central and motor systems are continuously running. Auditory feedback is well-known to augment human motor control and learning, and also verbal encouragement has the potential to acutely enhance neuromuscular performance in sports or daily living. This project (funded by the HPSL – Hermann-Paul-School of Linguistics) focuses on the role that the timing and intonation of vocal support might play. Especially, we are interested whether systematic desynchronization of verbal cues and movement patterns could manipulate the anticipation and intersegmental coordination during tasks such as drop jumps or chance-of-direction.
Principal Investigators
Prof. Dr. Dominic Gehring; Dr. Steffen Ringhof, Daniel Alcón, Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder
Contact
https://www.sport.uni-freiburg.de
Joint decisions as manifested
in coordinated bodily movement
Stevanovic et al. (2017) found that Finnish adults who were asked to jointly select adjectives for writing a children's book coordinated vocal and bodily behavior more strongly in the word search phase than in the decision phase. When participants could see each other, synchronization occurred through body sways; when they could not see each other, synchronization occurred more through pitch alignment. This study was recently replicated in our Language and Movement Lab, its main claims confirmed, and hypotheses generated for follow-up projects. Results suggest that different dyads robustly choose different resources for synchronization; for some, body sway is a good predictor, while others prefer head nodding or eye contact. Differences in modality choice correlate with how well the two participants know each other (e.g., head nodding is preferred when they did not know each other well). This research field thus combines elicited tasks with emergent, self-organized processes of coordinated decision making.
Principal Investigators
Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder; Dr. Steffen Ringhof, Janina Helwig, Daniel Alcón, Daniel Muz, Prof. Dr. Dominic Gehring
Contact
https://www.sport.uni-freiburg.de
Effects of elicited rupture and repair in psychotherapy and at the workplace
Rupture and repair phenomena, have been widely studied in psychotherapy process research in recent years. Research in conversation analysis and interactional linguistics suggests that communicative coordination after rupture is increased compared to non-rupture related sequences. We are about to take this hypothesis forward and will investigate phenomena of embodied coordination in the repair cycles subsequent to ruptures in the therapeutic alliance, which can be observed and validated using established expert-based rating procedures for the identification of ruptures in the relationship (Larsson et al 2019). We hypothesize that enhanced interactional synchrony can be observed and is an essential part of interactional repair cycles. The hypotheses can be extended also to other areas of interaction in which processes of relational ruptures play a role (e.g. the work place).
Principal Investigators
Prof. Dr. Stefan Schmidt; Prof. Dr. Carl E. Scheidt, Prof. Dr. Claas Lahmann
Contact
Klinik für Psychosomatische Medizin und Psychotherapie
Bewegungs- und Videolabor
Coordinated gaze behavior in turn-taking vs. during stance-taking
Looking into each other's eyes in conversation is associated with turn-taking, affective coordination as well as epistemic coordination. Examples include the request for content verification or repair, or handing over the right to speak. However, intercultural comparison shows that these communicative functions of eye contact are only apparently universal: some speech communities in India and in Andean America, for example, are reported as cultures in which eye contact is rare in comparison to Western societies, as it is restricted to stance-taking and not employed for turn-taking (Satti & Soto, 2021; Muz, 2022). We strive at exploring gaze behavior and its functions in lndian and Bolivian languages (e.g. working with the Añdes corpus (PI Pfänder, cf. Palacios & Pfänder (in press)), Kera’a corpus (PI Reinöhl, cf. Reinöhl, in press)), and how it interacts with verbal means of epistemic and affective coordination.
Principal Investigators
Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder; Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl, Dr. Ignacio Satti, Daniel Muz
Contact
Website - Uta Reinöhl
Website - Stefan Pfänder