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We introduce dGSLM, the first “textless” model able to generate audio samples of naturalistic spoken dialogues. It uses recent work on unsupervised spoken unit discovery coupled with a dual-tower transformer architecture with cross-attention trained on 2000 hours of two-channel raw conversational audio (Fisher dataset) without any text or labels. We show that our model is able to generate speech, laughter, and other paralinguistic signals in the two channels simultaneously and reproduces more naturalistic and fluid turn taking compared to a text-based cascaded model. ,

A growing body of research emphasizes both endogenous and social motivations in human vocal development. Our own efforts seek to establish an evolutionary and developmental perspective on the existence and usage of speech-like vocalizations (“protophones”) in the first year of life. We evaluated the relative occurrence of protophones in 40 typically developing infants across the second-half year based on longitudinal all-day recordings. Infants showed strong endogenous motivation to vocalize, producing vastly more protophones during independent vocal exploration and play than during vocal turn taking. Both periods of vocal play and periods of turn-taking corresponded to elevated levels of the most advanced protophones (canonical babbling) relative to periods without vocal play or without turn-taking. Notably, periods of turn taking showed even more canonical babbling than periods of vocal play. We conclude that endogenous motivation drives infants’ tendencies to explore and display a great number of speech-like vocalizations, but that social interaction drives the production of the most speech-like forms. The results inform our previously published proposal that the human infant has been naturally selected to explore protophone production and that the exploratory inclination in our hominin ancestors formed a foundation for language.

Play fighting is a common form of play reported among species of mammals, birds, and some other taxa. The competition present in play fighting revolves around gaining some advantage, such as biting a partner without being bitten. The behavior simulated during play fighting need not be restricted to that present in adult serious fighting, but can involve competitive interactions derived from amicable behavior, such as sex and social grooming, or from nonsocial competition, such as predation. What unifies play fighting, irrespective of the functional behavior being simulated, is that it involves some degree of reciprocity, or turn taking, that requires that the competition be attenuated by cooperation. However, there are several different ways in which cooperation can be inserted into playful interactions, and these vary in use across different species. The moderation of competition with cooperation forces animals to monitor their own actions and those of their partners, and this common feature appears to be one vehicle through which the experience of play fighting in the juvenile period can train animals for greater psychological resilience. The monitoring and contextual adjustment of actions influences the development of executive functions of the brain, which, in turn, leads to the development of more adaptable adults.

Mukbang is a Korean livestream where a host eats while interacting with viewers. The eater ‘speaks’ to the viewers while eating and the viewers ‘type’ to each other and to the eater through a live chat room. Using interactional sociolinguistics along with insights from conversation analysis (CA) studies, the present study examines how sociable eating is jointly and multimodally achieved in mukbang. Analyzing sixty-seven mukbang clips, I find that mukbang participants coordinate their actions through speech, written text, and embodied acts, and that this coordination creates involvement and, by extension, establishes both community and social agency. Specifically, recruitments are the basic joint action of eating, as participants, who are taking turns, assume footings of the recruit and the recruiter. The host embodies viewers’ text recruitments through embodied animating and puppeteering. As in street performance, the viewers often offer voluntary donations, and the host shows entertaining gratitude in response. (Mukbang, footing, recruitments, agency, involvement, constructed action, multimodal interaction, computer-mediated discourse)*

Mother-infant vocal interactions serve multiple functions in child development, but it remains unclear whether key features of these interactions are community-common or community-specific. We examined rates, interrelations, and contingencies of vocal interactions in 684 mothers and their 5½-month-old infants in diverse communities in 11 countries (Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, and the United States). Rates of mothers' and infants' vocalizations varied widely across communities and were uncorrelated. However, collapsing the data across communities, we found that mothers' vocalizations to infants were contingent on the offset of the infants' nondistress vocalizing, infants' vocalizations were contingent on the offset of their mothers' vocalizing, and maternal and infant contingencies were significantly correlated. These findings point to the beginnings of dyadic conversational turn taking. Despite broad differences in the overall talkativeness of mothers and infants, maternal and infant contingent vocal responsiveness is found across communities, supporting essential functions of turn taking in early-childhood socialization.

When people discuss something that they can both see, their attention becomes increasingly coupled. Previous studies have found that this coupling is temporally asymmetric (e.g., one person leads and one follows) when dyads are assigned conversational roles (e.g., speaker and listener). And while such studies have focused on the coupling of gaze, there is also evidence that people use their hands to coordinate attention. The present study uses a visual task to expand on this past work in two respects. First, rather than assigning conversational roles, participants’ background knowledge was manipulated (e.g., expert and novice) to elicit differential roles inherent to the conversation. Second, participants were permitted to gesture freely while interacting. Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis with data from mobile eye trackers and manually coded pointing gestures revealed that although more knowledgeable participants dominated the dialogue by talking and pointing more, the symmetry of coupled behaviors (gaze and pointing) between participants remained fixed. Asymmetric attentional coupling emerged, although this was dependent on conversational turn taking. Specifically, regardless of background knowledge, the currently speaking participant led attention, both with the eyes and with the hands. These findings suggest stable, turn-dependent interpersonal coupling dynamics, and highlight the role of pointing gestures and conversational turn-taking in multimodal attention coordination.

Standard approaches to the analysis of crisis situations either take some psychological stance, where the individual is the unit of analysis, or they investigate groups of actors taking turns, where individuals act following their own interpretation of what others have done. Philosophers have characterized these two approaches as self-actional and interactional. Actions and interpretations clearly can be assigned to one or the other actor, which allows allocating the responsibility for a violent event to someone \"culprit.\" A radically different, rarely chosen approach is a transactional one, where each action is understood as joint action both in space and in time that cannot be decomposed into independent individual contributions. In this paper, following a sketch of the differences in the epistemological underpinnings between standard and transactional approaches, exemplifying analyses are presented and discussed from a violent encounter that left a streetcar passenger dead and a police officer before the courts of justice for homicide. Discussion topics include the attribution of cause and effect, understanding the historical trajectories of participant actors, and the consequences of analyzing events in terms of events (not substantive entities, and inter-actions).

Conversation is the natural setting for language learning and use, and a key property of conversation is the smooth taking of turns. In adult conversations, delays between turns are minimal (typically 200 ms or less) because listeners display a striking ability to predict what their partner will say, and they formulate a response before their partner’s turn ends. Here, we tested how this ability to coordinate comprehension and production develops in preschool children. In an interactive paradigm, 106 children (ages 3–5 years) and 48 adults responded to questions that varied in predictability but were controlled for linguistic complexity. Using a novel distributional approach to data analysis, we found that when children can predict a question’s ending, they leave shorter gaps before responding, suggesting that they can optimize the timing of their conversational turns like adults do. In line with a recent ethological theory of turn taking, this early competency helps explain how conversational contexts support language development.

Social insect colonies are often considered to be highly efficient collective systems, with division of labor at the root of their ecological success. However, in many species, a large proportion of a colony’s workers appear to spend their time completely inactive. The role of this inactivity for colony function remains unclear. Here, we investigate how inactivity is distributed among workers and over time in the ant Temnothorax rugatulus. We show that the level of inactivity is consistent for individual workers, but differs significantly among workers, that is, some workers effectively specialize on ‘inactivity’. We also show that workers have circadian rhythms, although intra-nest tasks tend to be performed uniformly across the whole day. Differences in circadian rhythms, or workers taking turns resting (i.e., working in shifts), cannot explain the observation that some workers are consistently inactive. Using extensive individual-level data to describe the overall structure of division of labor, we show that ‘inactive workers’ form a group distinct from other task groups. Hierarchical clustering suggests that inactivity is the primary variable in differentiating both workers and tasks. Our results underline the importance of inactivity as a behavioral state and the need for further studies on its evolution.

Emotions can have important effects on performance and socioeconomic outcomes. We study a natural experiment where two teams of professionals compete in a tournament taking turns in a sequence. As the sequential order is determined by the random outcome of a coin flip, the treatment and control groups are determined via explicit randomization. Hence, absent any psychological effects, both teams should have the same probability of winning. Yet, we find a systematic first-mover advantage. Further, professionals are self-aware of their own psychological effects and, when given the chance, they rationally react by systematically taking advantage of these effects. (JEL C93, D03, D82, L83)