Unimodal and Multimodal Co-activation in First Encounters ---- A Case Study

In human communication, people adapt to each other and jointly activate behavior in different ways. In this pilot study, focusing on one individual (Cf2) in four interactions two types of co-activation, i.e. repetition and reformulation in two modalities, vocal-verbal and gestural are investigated in two ChineseChinese and two Chinese-Swedish videorecordings of university students’ first encounters. The aim, on the one hand, is to explore features of co-activation that might be specific to Chinese interactions or common to ChineseSwedish interactions and, on the other hand, to try to see how one person Cf2 adapts to different strangers. In our analysis, we have considered both culture and gender dependent differences. We find that co-activation is more often unimodal than multimodal, and more often involves gesture than speech. We also find that the more similar interlocutors are regarding cultural/ethnic, linguistic, and gender/biological background, the more coactivation takes place, especially in the form of repetition.