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Feedback in Interaction

22-23 May 2025 (pre-conference workshops on 21 May 2025), University of Cologne

In both signed and spoken conversations, recipients continuously provide multimodal feedback to the signer or speaker. This feedback may take the form of manual signs, such as yes, spoken forms like mm or yeah, hand gestures, or non-manual visual cues such as head nods, eyebrow movements, or smiles. These feedback signals serve several important conversational functions: they can demonstrate the recipient’s active engagement, comprehension of the preceding utterance, readiness to continue the conversation, offer an evaluation of the content presented, express affiliation with the speaker or signer, and signal the presence or absence of conversational breakdowns.

Given its criticality, multimodal feedback provides a valuable lens through which to examine the mechanisms underlying human interaction. It enables researchers to explore how communicative dynamics are influenced by variations across individuals, languages, and conversational contexts. However, much remains to be understood about the interconnections between different interactional mechanisms, such as backchannels, repairs, or alignment, both within and between conversational turns.

LingCologne 2025 will focus on these critical mechanisms, offering a platform for cutting-edge research into the diverse dimensions of feedback. The conference aims to uncover connections across various theoretical and applied frameworks, particularly emphasizing new insights into the multimodal cues—including vocal, manual, and non-manual signals—used by speakers and signers alike. To guide these discussions, four key themes related to feedback have been identified.

 

LingCologne2025 will feature presentations by eight of the world’s leading researchers in these themes, promoting a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of feedback in language. We invite scholars from linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, and related fields to join us in Cologne to deepen our collective understanding of conversational feedback and its profound impact on human communication.

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