Management of Intersubjectivity and Progressivity through Simultaneous Gestural Matching

摘要

By analyzing the storytelling sequence in a communicative retelling task, this article investigates how participants manage two potentially competing orientations (intersubjectivity and progressivity of storytelling) through Simultaneous Gestural Matching (SGM) between the teller and hearer. Participants of talk-in-interaction have their own space to exhibit their understanding of the conversation visually through nonverbal behaviors such as gestures and posture. SGM is the spatiotem-poral coordination of these nonverbal behaviors. Detailed analysis of talk-in-interaction demonstrates that SGM enables participants to show visual, public display of their understanding and thereby contributes to creating intersubjectivity among participants without disrupting the progressivity of storytelling in a manner that is sensitive to the structure of the activity.