Talker Quality in Human and Machine Interaction by Benjamin Weiss

Author:Benjamin Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030227692
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.2 Talker Quality and Conversational Behavior

The communicative styles and strategies used in conversation do affect the interpersonal evaluation and thus the Talker Quality. Such styles can be analyzed from authentic conversations, or can be produced by confederates to increase or decrease the success or even Talker Quality itself [21, 43, 125, 195, 268]. In recent years, a mature level of understanding of conversational processes of dialog partners engaged in spoken interaction has been reached. For the scope of this book, two relevant aspects are the process of prosodically entraining in pitch and speech tempo, as well as the frequency, position, and realization forms of verbal dialog phenomena like back-channel and turn-taking signals.

Linguistic entrainment represents a frequently observed phenomenon of two interlocutors mutually adapting with respect to syntactic, lexical, segmental, or suprasegmental speech production [44]. Most results on it concern the lexical [45, 46] or the syntactic level [297], but rarely, e.g., pronunciation [275] or acoustic-prosodic aspects [225]. Entrainment might be related to the general observation of a positive effect of similarity [212] as described in Sect. 1.​3. It is even argued that such entrainment is necessary for mutual understanding [283, 284]. It typically happens quickly, i.e., early in dialog [20]. Despite approaches arguing for an automatic imitation process grounding the entrainment phenomenon [66, 211, 283], e.g., due to priming, its degree is found to vary, e.g., due to social role or interpersonal attraction. This points rather against an automatic process, but not necessarily for a conscious one, if unconscious social moderators exist. For the negotiation of lexical choices in dialog an automatic process is questionable [45]. Even data for “dis-entrainment” is reported [276, 322]. The degree of entrainment seems to reflect aspects of interest and cooperation and relates to task success [77, 211, 298] or smoothness of the conversation [266], and its evaluation [42]. Linguistic entrainment is even observed in humans conversing with machines [44]. An explanation for this relationship between entrainment and evaluation might be the automatic motor congruence facilitating entrainment with a positive attitude or positive relationship [100].

For estimating the effects of the frequency and position of back-channel or of the smoothness of turn-taking on individual dialog success and quality, typically the deviation from a naturally occurring average is postulated. For example, a lag between − 100 and 300 ms during turn changes is considered as barely noticeable, while pauses of the interlocutor a second before responding are regarded as too long and thus might trigger inquiries in the case of an answer expected [94]. The studies presented in the following deliberately assessed the impact of such signals on evaluations, although usually not in such a fine-grained temporal solution.

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