Interlanguaging and dining in signing and speaking family meals
Résumé
In family dinners, language practices can be analyzed as they occur in real life and real time in the framework of multiparty interactions and multiactivity (Haddington et al. 2014) to capture the multiple deployments of the embodied behaviors of speakers and signers.
In this study, we analyzed four French signing and four French speaking family’s coordination of interlanguaging and eating around the dinner table. The families composed of two parents and two to three children aged 3 to 10 were filmed with three cameras to capture all family members’ behaviors. The three videos per dinner were synchronized and coded on ELAN. We annotated all participants’ acting, and languaging. We focused on adults ‘ expertise and on children’s socialization to the finely-tuned coordination and in situ organization of the joint activities of conversing and dining that fully engage the same body components according to the language used and their age.
Our quantitative analyses show how family members collaboratively manage multiple streams of activity through the embodied performances of dining and interacting. We uncover different profiles according to participants’ modality of expression and status. The hearing participants’ co-activity management illustrates their monitoring of dining and conversing and how they progressively master the affordances of the visual and vocal channels to maintain the simultaneity of the two activities. The deaf adults skillfully manages to alternate smoothly between dining and interacting. The deaf younger children manifest how they are in the process of developing their skills to manage multi-activity. Our qualitative analyses focus on the ecology of visual-gestural and audio-vocal languaging in the context of co-activity according to language and participant. We open new perspectives on the management of action, gesture, speech and sign in multimodal interlanguaging in multiparty interaction.