Identifying units in interaction: Reactive tokens in Korean and English conversations

TLDR

Reactive tokens are conversational resources that listeners use to co‑construct a speaker’s turn, varying in form, duration, and placement. The study contrasts how Americans and Koreans use reactive tokens in English and Korean, illustrating how language resources shape active listening. It finds that Korean listeners are obliged to provide reactive tokens—unlike English listeners who use them to defer a full turn—and that Korean bilinguals transfer some Korean conversational resources into English.

Abstract

Reactive tokens are conversational resources by which a listener co‐constructs a speaker's turn at talk. The resources that are available include the forms of the reactive tokens themselves, their duration, and their placement by the listener in the current speaker's turn. The present paper is a contrastive study of the use of these resources by Americans in English, and by Koreans in their native language and in English, and in it we show the ecological relationship between the resources that a language provides and their use in constructing active listenership. Although previous research on English has found listeners use reactive tokens to pass up the opportunity for a full turn at talk, we show that, in Korean, reactive tokens are often elicited by the current speaker and the listener is obligated to provide them. We present evidence that Korean bilinguals transfer some conversational resources from their native language when they take part in conversation in English.