A Distributional Analysis of Laughter Across Turns and Utterances

We present here a study on the use of laughter in spontaneous interactions, examining its distribution across two linguistic levels: utterances and turns. A multilingual corpus of dyadic conversations was employed, containing recordings in French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Laughter was coded based on its position inside the analysis unit and its distribution with respect to the event type and the language was analyzed. The results showed that laughter distribution is modulated by the linguistic level, as well as by the laughter event type. Moreover, differences between languages seem to depend on the analysis level.