Audibility and Intelligibility of Talk in Passing-By Interactions: A Methodological Puzzle.

A central assumption of conversation and multimodal analysts is that the participants have sensorial access to the acoustic features, most notably talk, of the studied interactions, which are available thanks to the recordings. If speakers stand in close proximity, a microphone is placed between or on one of them, and the analyst considers that the resulting recording captures the sound that is relevant both for the participants and for research purposes. The study of mobile and spatially distributed interactions comes with a challenge: If speakers are not spatially close but apart from each other, what is the relevant sound for the researcher to collect and examine? In this article, we show that prosodic, compositional and sequential features of the same segment of talk sound differently depending on the exact location of the hearer, or recording device, which is relevant for the analyst as well as for the participants. Our study was based on a corpus of hospital staff corridor interactions captured with a set-up composed of four video-cameras and eight wireless microphones operating simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]