An Experimental Exploration of Quotidian Framing

Abstract

Quotidian framing is a pragmatic strategy originally observed in studies of conversations among older women in Japan (Matsumoto, 2011). In the observed conversations, when recounting a painful event such as the death of a husband, the narrator included trivial details from the perspective of ordinary life, thereby reframing the extraordinary event into the “quotidian” with the apparent effect of lightening the atmosphere and regaining a normal life. In the current paper, we investigate to what extent this strategy is also acceptable in other languages and in situations with other participants, and we aim to gather empirical evidence on the functions of this strategy. The languages investigated are Japanese and US English. Our procedure was to first identify two representative examples from the original data set and to condense the original story told in conversational interaction into more coherent stories that can be told in one multi-turn unit. Then, we had native speakers of the respective target languages perform the narrations, using a technique that has been shown to produce prosodic realizations with very similar characteristics as authentic conversational speech. The audio files thus created were then combined with videos of a small, humanoid robot speaking to a female listener, who was portrayed from the back. We chose a female voice for the robot and a female listener since the original conversations were carried out among female speakers. The videos were then played to 50 US and 50 Japanese participants in an online questionnaire. The results confirm the suspected pragmatic effects of quotidian framing for a larger age group, for different genders and across cultures. Furthermore, the study provides another example of the usefulness of human-robot interactions as testbed for cross-cultural research.