Methods, Tools and Techniques for Multimodal Analysis of Accommodation in Intercultural Communication

Abstract

The holistic approach to interpersonal communication in dialogue, involving the analysis of multiple sensory modalities and channels, poses a serious challenge not only in terms of research techniques and methods but also from the viewpoint of data infrastructure. In the Borderland project, the process of communicative accommodation is studied in young people in the intercultural context of the Polish-German boundary region. In order to collect, annotate, and analyse research material, a new technical and analytic infrastructure has been developed. Centred around a data management system, it incorporates well-known annotation and transcription tools along with custom-designed transcription and annotation tagsets and procedures. Data and metadata formats are designed to enable further corpus-based analyses of accommodation-related processes, mostly in the paralinguistic domain of prosody and gestures. Data formats used in the project ensure wide interchangeability and usage of almost any analytic software. Previously tested methods of quantitative accommodation analysis are adjusted, supplemented with new custom procedures, and applied to each channel under study as well as to the cross-modal (e.g., prosody – gesture) accommodation processes.