French Face-to-Face Interaction: Repetition as a Multimodal Resource - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 149

3. Repetition
3.1 Theoretical background: A general definition
To take a rather objective term, “repetition” in interaction has been
observed by many researchers working in different fields. Chartrand
and Bargh (1999), but also Garrod and Pickering (2004) argue that
repetition is needed to make conversations easier or more fluent and
that speakers align “their representations at different linguistic levels
at the same time” (2004:9), thus reducing the processing load for each
participant in a conversation. Several terms have been coined to refer
to repetition that do not, however, necessarily refer to the same process.
Working on gesture and sound repetition of adults by infants, Jones
(2006:3) distinguishes between emulation, a repetition of an “outcome
produced by a model, with no requirement that the actual motor
behavior should match that of the model”, and mimicry (the most
widely used term in multimodal studies), “a behavior that matches
or closely approximates the movements of another”. She also goes
against the general view that mimicry is innate and contends instead
that it is a learned behavior that arises in infants around 18 months
and that is the result of infants being mimicked by their caregivers. An
infant's response to an adult protruding their tongue with the same
movement would not be imitation according to her but rather a general
response to any interesting stimulus. The debate is out of the scope
of this chapter, but Garrod and Pickering (2004) adopt a similar view
when they describe conversations amongst adults, as they establish
a sequential link between primed representations—what is called by
Chartrand and Bargh (1999) the chameleon effect, i.e. a perception-
behavior link—which leads to imitation, which in turn leads to
alignment of representations (op. cit., 9), or what is termed elsewhere
convergence . They illustrate this sequential process with 'yawning': if
one sees someone yawn, one yawns in return (primed representation),
but one also tends to feel more tired or bored (imitation and alignment
of representations with the initial yawner). They also mention that
the whole process is unconscious and largely automatic but “is also
conditional to the extent that it can be inhibited when it conflicts with
current goals and purposes, or promoted when it supports those goals”
(op. cit., 10). At last, both Garrod and Pickering (op. cit.) and Shockley
et al. (2009) mention that alignment does not mean that speakers have
to be in agreement in a conversation and that it is rather a process
speakers use to simply understand each other. Tabensky (2001:217),
however, states that what she calls echoing “can be merely a sign of