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2022 ◽  
Vol 6 (GROUP) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Ronda Ringfort-Felner ◽  
Matthias Laschke ◽  
Shadan Sadeghian ◽  
Marc Hassenzahl

Soon, voice assistants might be able to engage in fully-fledged social conversations with people, rather than merely providing a voice-operated interface to functionality and data. So far, not much is known about designing such "social" voice assistants and the potential social experiences, which could and should emerge in everyday situations. In the present paper, we created a design fiction to explore a sophisticated social voice assistant in the context of the car. Based on models from psychology and psychotherapy, we designed the fictional "virtual passenger" Kiro. We created a website for Kiro (http://www.heykiro.com/), distributed it, and collected responses in various ways (e.g., comments). We further ran a market research-type focus group. In general, we found people to accept Kiro as a conversation partner but not as a replacement for human-human conversations. We suggest designing social voice assistants in a way to enable novel types of socially fulfilling, yet distinct human-machine conversations.


Author(s):  
Cristina Álvaro Aranda

Researchers have long been preoccupied with the issue of role in healthcare interpreting. However, most studies approach this construct in the course of medical consultations, leaving somewhat unattended other spaces and activities in which interpreters also participate. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the healthcare interpreters’ role in these areas. Drawing on participant observation, I examined the roles played by five interpreters at a hospital in Madrid for five months in activities different to provider-patient interactions (e.g. waiting with patients). Seven key roles were identified outside medical consultations: intercultural and moral mediator, patient advocate, institutional navigator, healthcare ambassador, information miner and companion/conversation partner. A key finding is that most events in which interpreters participate occur outside medical consultations, which makes it essential to shift the attention to the roles played in these alternative spaces. Understanding the role of healthcare interpreters in different activities within the realm of healthcare scenarios is essential to construct an accurate vision of what being just an interpreter really means.


Author(s):  
Avraham N. Kluger ◽  
Guy Itzchakov

Listening is associated with and a likely cause of desired organizational outcomes in numerous areas, including job performance, leadership, quality of relationships (e.g., trust), job knowledge, job attitudes, and well-being. To advance understanding of the powerful effects of listening on organizational outcomes, we review the construct of listening, its measurement and experimental manipulations, and its outcomes, antecedents, and moderators. We suggest that listening is a dyadic phenomenon that benefits both the listener and the speaker, including supervisor-subordinate and salesperson-customer dyads. To explain previous findings and generate novel and testable hypotheses, we propose the episodic listening theory: listening can lead to a fleeting state of togetherness, in which dyad members undergo a mutual creative thought process. This process yields clarity, facilitates the generation of novel plans, increases well-being, and strengthens attachment to the conversation partner. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 9 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 1013-1028
Author(s):  
Kenta Higashi ◽  
Naoya Isoyama ◽  
Nobuchika Sakata ◽  
Kiyoshi Kiyokawa ◽  

Interpersonal communication is so important in everyday life that it is desirable everyone who participates in the conversation is satisfied. However, every participant of the conversation cannot be satisfied in such cases as those wherein only one person cannot keep up with the conversation and feels alienated, or wherein someone cannot communicate non-verbal expressions with his/her conversation partner adequately. In this study, we have focused on facial direction and gaze among the various factors that are said to affect conversational satisfaction. We have attempted to lessen any sense of non-participation in the conversation and increase the conversational satisfaction of the non-participant in a tripartite conversation by modulating the visual information in such a way that the remaining two parties turn toward the non-participating party. In the experiments we have conducted in VR environments, we have reproduced a conversation of two male adults recorded in actual environments using two avatars. The experimental subjects have watched this over their HMDs. The experiments have found that visually modulating the avatars’ faces and gazes such that they appear to turn toward the subjects has increased the subjects’ sense of participation in the conversation. Nevertheless, the experiments have not increased the subjects’ conversational enjoyment, a component of the factors for conversational satisfaction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-173
Author(s):  
Iva Ivanova ◽  
Holly Branigan ◽  
Janet McLean ◽  
Albert Costa ◽  
Martin Pickering

Two picture-matching-game experiments investigated if lexical-referential alignment to non-native speakers is enhanced by a desire to aid communicative success (by saying something the conversation partner can certainly understand), a form of audience design. In Experiment 1, a group of native speakers of British English that was not given evidence of their conversation partners’ picture-matching performance showed more alignment to non-native than to native speakers, while another group that was given such evidence aligned equivalently to the two types of speaker. Experiment 2, conducted with speakers of Castilian Spanish, replicated the greater alignment to non-native than native speakers without feedback. However, Experiment 2 also showed that production of grammatical errors by the confederate produced no additional increase of alignment even though making errors suggests lower communicative competence. We suggest that this pattern is consistent with another collaborative strategy, the desire to model correct usage. Together, these results support a role for audience design in alignment to non-native speakers in structured task-based dialogue, but one that is strategically deployed only when deemed necessary.


2021 ◽  
Vol 110 (5) ◽  
pp. 229-258
Author(s):  
Ann Kathrin Fischer ◽  
Kristina Herbert

This paper investigates discursive structures of spoken language in formal and informal communication settings (almost 62 hours of recorded time) of urban speakers in Austria’s two biggest cities Vienna and Graz and their surroundings. We focus on so-called bipartite “Operator-Skopus-Strukturen” (‘operator-scope-structures’), examining their pragmatic and discourse organising function within specific conversational situations. Our main aim is to offer in-depth analyses of these structures by characterising the mental and communicative status of such utterances. Starting out with a discussion of characteristics of spoken language research, especially by arguing for the replacement of the grammatical concept of sentences with the interactional concept of turn-constructional units, we address the phenomenon of discourse markers and Operator-Skopus-Strukturen in particular. This is followed by the description of our data set and the subsequent analyses and discussion of the selected examples. According to our findings, Operator-Skopus-Strukturen appear in both conversational settings and among all groups of speakers. We demonstrate that all speakers use the structures with the same pragmatic function of giving information to their conversation partner on how to interpret and understand the message behind the utterance. Within this scope, the speaker’s intention can vary depending on the conversation partner, the topic of the conversation or the situation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Hilte ◽  
Walter Daelemans ◽  
Reinhild Vandekerckhove

The present study examines how teenagers adapt their language use to that of their conversation partner (i.e., the linguistic phenomenon of accommodation) in interactions with peers (intragenerational communication) and with older interlocutors (intergenerational communication). We analyze a large corpus of Flemish teenagers’ conversations on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which appear to be highly peer-oriented. With Poisson models, we examine whether the teenage participants adjust their writing style to older interlocutors. The same trend emerges for three sets of prototypical markers of the informal online genre: teenagers insert significantly fewer of these markers when interacting with older interlocutors, thus matching their interlocutors’ style and increasing linguistic similarity. Finally, the analyses reveal subtle differences in accommodation patterns for the distinct linguistic variables with respect to the impact of the teenagers’ sociodemographic profiles and their interlocutors’ age.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Ferguson ◽  
Allison Ouimet ◽  
Olivia Gardam

Background and Objectives: People with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) evaluate themselves negatively before, during, and after anxiety-provoking social situations, which leads to negative consequences (e.g., performance deficits, memory impairments, and post-event processing). Despite decades of research, little is known regarding whether these evaluations generalize to how they view others. Social projection theory—the belief that others are similar to oneself—might further extend the basic Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) model. Our aim was to understand whether the degree to which people negatively evaluate a visibly anxious person causes them to negatively evaluate themselves. Methods: 172 unselected participants completed several baseline questionnaires. We then randomly assigned participants to provide harsh-, lenient-, or no-evaluation of a videotaped anxious person (i.e., other-evaluations) while we assessed their state anxiety. After, they evaluated the anxious person on multiple criteria. Participants then participated in an impromptu conversation task and subsequently evaluated their own performance. Results: Although our manipulation was effective, we found no emotional or behavioural differences between conditions. However, people in the harsh-evaluation condition recalled significantly fewer facts about their conversation partner than did people in the lenient- and no-evaluation conditions. Limitations: After data cleaning, the sample size was slightly smaller than planned; most analyses were nonetheless appropriately powered. Our findings may not generalize beyond unselected undergraduate students; replication in a clinical sample is warranted. Conclusions: These findings highlight the cognitive consequences (i.e., memory impairments) of other-evaluations, which cognitive behavioural therapists should consider when treating individuals with SAD.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willemijn Doedens ◽  
Arpita Bose ◽  
Lydia Lambert ◽  
Lotte Meteyard

Aphasia is language impairment due to acquired brain damage. It affects people’s ability to communicate effectively in everyday life. Little is known about the influence of environmental factors on everyday communication for people with aphasia (PWA). It is generally assumed that for PWA speaking to a familiar person (i.e. with shared experiences and knowledge) is easier than speaking to a stranger (Howard, Swinburn, and Porter). This assumption is in line with existing psycholinguistic theories of common ground (Clark, 1996), but there is little empirical data to support this assumption. The current study investigated whether PWA benefit from conversation partner (CP) familiarity during goal-directed communication, and how this effect compared to a group of neurologically healthy controls (NHC). Sixteen PWA with mild to severe aphasia, sixteen matched NHC, plus self-selected familiar CPs participated. Pairs were videotaped while completing a collaborative communication task. Pairs faced identical Playmobile rooms: the view of the other’s room was blocked. Listeners attempted to replicate the 5-item set-up in the instructor’s room. Roles were swapped for each trial. For the unfamiliar condition, participants were paired with another participant’s CP (PWA were matched with another PWA’s CP based on their aphasia profile). The outcomes were canonical measures of communicative efficiency (i.e. accuracy, time to complete, etc.). Results showed different effects in response to the unfamiliar partner for PWA compared to NHC: In the instructor role, PWA showed faster trial times with the unfamiliar partner, but similar accuracy scores in both conditions. NHC, on the other hand, showed similar trial times across CPs, but higher accuracy scores with the unfamiliar partner. In the listener role, PWA showed a pattern more similar to NHC: equal trial times across conditions, and an improvement in accuracy scores with the unfamiliar partner. Results show that conversation partner familiarity significantly affected communication for PWA dyads on a familiar task, but not for NHC. This research highlights the importance of identifying factors that influence communication for PWA and understanding how this effect varies across aphasia profiles. This knowledge will ultimately inform our assessment and intervention of real-world communication.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gemma L. Williams ◽  
Tim Wharton ◽  
Caroline Jagoe

A central diagnostic and anecdotal feature of autism is difficulty with social communication. We take the position that communication is a two-way, intersubjective phenomenon—as described by the double empathy problem—and offer up relevance theory (a cognitive account of utterance interpretation) as a means of explaining such communication difficulties. Based on a set of proposed heuristics for successful and rapid interpretation of intended meaning, relevance theory positions communication as contingent on shared—and, importantly, mutually recognized—“relevance.” Given that autistic and non-autistic people may have sometimes markedly different embodied experiences of the world, we argue that what is most salient to each interlocutor may be mismatched. Relevance theory would predict that where this salient information is not (mutually) recognized or adjusted for, mutual understanding may be more effortful to achieve. This paper presents the findings from a small-scale, linguistic ethnographic study of autistic communication featuring eight core autistic participants. Each core autistic participant engaged in three naturalistic conversations around the topic of loneliness with: (1) a familiar, chosen conversation partner; (2) a non-autistic stranger and (3) an autistic stranger. Relevance theory is utilized as a frame for the linguistic analysis of the interactions. Mutual understanding was unexpectedly high across all types of conversation pairings. In conversations involving two autistic participants, flow, rapport and intersubjective attunement were significantly increased and in three instances, autistic interlocutors appeared to experience improvements in their individual communicative competence contrasted with their other conversations. The findings have the potential to guide future thinking about how, in practical terms, communication between autistic and non-autistic people in both personal and public settings might be improved.


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