Affiliation in interpreter-mediated psychotherapeutic talk : the role of gaze and gesture

In the context of psychotherapy, it has been shown that therapists employ verbal and embodied resources - such as gaze and head nods - to display alignment and affiliation during patient’s turns (Muntigl et al. 2012, 2014; author 2015). In interpreter-mediated therapeutic encounters, however, the contiguity between the patient’s utterance and the therapist’s response is disturbed (Bot 2005) and the communicative contact is established with the aid of a mediating third party. Moreover, through her physical presence, the interpreter does not only act as a mere conveyor of patient’s and the therapist’s words, but also influences the therapeutic experience (Bot 2005). Drawing on the insights from conversation analysis (Gardner 2001, Stivers 2008, Peräkylä 2013), the present study analyzes how affiliation is displayed and interactively achieved in a therapeutic conversation by focusing on the interpreter’s and the therapist’s listener responses during patient’s turns. More specifically, the study focuses on the interplay between gaze and head nods as tokens of affiliation (Stivers 2008). As shown in previous research (Wadensjö 2001, Bot 2005, Mason 2012), gaze direction has an important function in signaling conversational attention and managing the interaction in face-to-face interpreter-mediated dialogue. Finally, we examine the differences in the affiliative responses employed by the interpreter and the therapist. The analysis was based on an interpreter-mediated psychotherapeutic session between a Russian speaking asylum seeker and a Dutch therapist. The session was recorded using mobile eye-tracking technology (Gullberg & Kita 2009, Jokinen 2010, Brône & Oben 2015). Through this innovative approach, we were able to capture detailed gaze information from all interlocutors together with the co-occurring gestures and to analyze the interaction from a unique ‘speaker-internal’ perspective (Brône et al. 2014). The study contributes to our understanding of the interpreter’s social role in the institutional context of mental health care. It also shows how the interpreter and the therapist employ different resources to indicate affiliation. And finally, the study illustrates the importance of a multimodal approach to the study of dialogue interpreting in the context of psychotherapy. REFERENCES Bot, H. 2005. Dialogue Interpreting in Mental Health, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Publishers. Brône, G., Oben, B., Vranjes, J., Feyaerts, K. 2014. Multimodal constructions for dialogue management: On the role of eye gaze and gesture in dyadic and triadic interactions. Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS ). San Diego, USA, 8-11 July 2014. Brône, G. & Oben, B. 2015. InSight Interaction. A multimodal and multifocal dialogue corpus. Language Resources and Evaluation 49, 195-214 Gardner, R. 2001. When Listeners Talk: Response tokens and listener stance. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Publishing. Gullberg, M. & Kita, S. 2009. Attention to speech-accompanying gestures: Eye movements and information uptake. Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour 33: 251-277. Jokinen, K. 2010. Non-verbal signals for turn-taking & feedback. Proc. of 7th Int. Conf. on Language Resources & Evaluation (LREC) International Universal Communication Symposium. Muntigl, P. Knight, N. Watkins, A. 2012. Working to keep aligned in psychotherapy: using nods as a dialogic resource to display affiliation. Language and Dialogue 2(1), 9-27. Muntigl, P. & Horvath, A. O. 2014. The therapeutic relationship in action: How therapists and clients co-manage relational disaffiliation. Psychotherapy Research 24(3), Peräkylä, A. 2013. Conversation Analysis in Psychotherapy. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.) The handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 251-274). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Stivers, T. 2008. Stance, alignment and affiliation during story telling: when nodding is a token of preliminary affiliation. Research on Language in Social Interaction 41, 29-55. Wadensjö, C. 2001. “Interpreting in Crisis: The Intepreters’ Position in Therapeutic Encounters,” in: Mason, I. (ed.) 2001. Triadic Exchanges. Studies in Dialogue Interpreting. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 71-85. Yngve, V. H. 1970. On getting a word in edgewise. In: Papers from the Sixth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago. 567-577