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.