This paper reports findings from an ongoing study investigating turn length and backchannel
responses in dyadic conversations in British Sign Language (BSL) and their relationship to
social factors, such as age and gender. Previous research has revealed gender differences
concerning turn length and frequency of backchannel responses. For example, it is reported
that male English speakers tend to hold the floor longer than women in mixed-sex dyads
(Coates, 2004) and that men and women’s backchannel behaviour (e.g., nodding, shaking the
head, making small vocalisations such as ‘hmm’ or ‘yeah’, see Duncan (1974)) differ in same
sex and mixed sex dyads (Bilous & Krauss, 1998). The relationship between gender and
backchannel use is, however, reported to vary over time and according to culture, language
and discourse type (Feke 2003, Dixon & Foster 1998).
Although few studies have examined turn length and backchannel responses using signed
language data, some findings have been reported. Nowell (1989) found no differences in time
spent signing in six American Sign Language (ASL) mixed-sex dyads during interviews as
well as no differences in signed backchannels. In contrast, a small-scale pilot study into BSL
suggested that men produce fewer non-manual backchannels in conversations than women
(Sutton-Spence, 2000). Additionally, Mesch et al. (2011), investigating Swedish Sign
Language found that younger signers produced fewer backchannels than older signers.
This paper reports findings from a study in progress investigating these aspects of
conversational behaviour in 30 informal British Sign Language (BSL) conversations (taken
from the BSL Corpus Project, see Schembri et al., 2011) in mixed sex and single sex dyads
involving older and younger deaf native and non-native signers (60 participants in total).
Using ELAN, we coded ten minutes of each conversation, noting when each signer had the
floor, and marking any time the addressee made any manual or non-manual backchannel
response. All annotated data were then exported and analysed using Rbrul multivariate
statistical software
An overall analysis involving all 60 signers suggested no significant differences in the
amount of time spent signing by signers of either gender in same sex or mixed dyads
However, we did find older signers (50 and above) prefer significantly longer turns.
Furthermore, a preliminary analysis based on 30 signers revealed no significant differences
between gender and age groups in the amount of time spent on manual or non-manual
backchannels. It appears that female dyads spent longer nodding than male or mixed dyads,
although this difference was not found to be significant. This paper will present a complete
analysis of non-manual and manual backchannels (incorporating the remaining 50% of the
dataset) outlining any potential effects due to social factors. These findings appear to suggest
that, unlike English, sociolinguistic variation in conversational behaviour in BSL may not be
conditioned by gender. We conclude by discussing the implications of this study for the
sociolinguistics of signed and spoken languages.
.
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