Laughter Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

Human verbal communication is a complex phenomenon involving
dynamics that normally result in the alignment of participants
on several modalities, and across various linguistic domains.
We examined here whether such dynamics occur also for
paralinguistic events, in particular, in the case of laughter. Using
a conversational corpus containing dyadic interactions in three
languages (French, German and Mandarin Chinese), we investigated
three measures of alignment: convergence, synchrony and
agreement. Support for convergence and synchrony was found
in all three languages, although the level of support varied with
the language, while the agreement in laughter type was found
to be significant for the German data. The implications of these
findings towards a better understanding of the role of laughter
in human communication are discussed.