Cognition, Empathy & Interaction: Floor Management of English and Japanese Conversation

Conversational analysis is an interdisciplinary field that draws on cognitive science, social psychology, sociology, pragmatics, and the ethnography of communication. These various disciplines provide both qualitative and quantitative foundations for conversational analysis. The ultimate goal of this study is to investigate what communication is: what its goals are, why people talk, and how conversational goals are achieved. The primary concerns of this study are to investigate the interactions among cognition, emotion, and social norms, using the floor model proposed by Edelsky (1981) and Schultz, Florio, and Erickson (1982), and to further develop their model for the analysis of conversational interaction.