Sounding for Others project

This website covers the information outreach for the Sounding for Others project. Our research team began work by looking at non-lexical vocalizations (hence the website name), and began to see instances where these sounds, which previously were assumed to be organized by individuals, actually involved a lot of social activity from all participants in interaction. In particular, humans can produce non-lexical sounds on behalf of and with others – they sound for others, and distribute the ‘ownership’ of the sound across multiple people. We wanted to learn more about how such a phenomenon challenged our ideas about language as an individual tool and something that a single person produces at a time. Hence the Sounding for Others project!

The best place to start learning more is our article overviewing different ways the phenomenon can appear in interaction, and our recent special issue, in which we and many colleagues wrote about how this phenomenon works in different languages and activities. We summarize the special issue here.

This project is funded by the Riksbanks Jubileumsfonden (RJ P21-0447).