TY - GEN

T1 - Alignment of Communicative Behaviors and Familiarity in First Encounters

AU - Navarretta, Costanza

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - Overlapping speech in conversations has been seenas a signal of alignment between the conversation participants.Moreover, researchers have suggested that the alignment increaseswith the increasing degree of familiarity of the participants.Similarly, synchronic body behaviors have been studiedespecially in psychological studies. Determining to which extentalignment of verbal and non-verbal behaviors takes place in conversationsin which a large amount of information is exchanged, isimportant a) for understanding how humans communicate andb) providing empirical based models for designing coginfocomsystems which interact and support humans in the process ofacquiring and sharing information.The present pilot study contributes to this research aimingto determine to what extent alignment of speech and facialexpressions occurs in twelve audio- and video-recorded Danishfirst encounters and whether it increases when the participantsget more acquainted as suggested, at least for speech, in theliterature. Alignment of verbal and non verbal behaviors isinvestigated by extracting overlapping spoken contributions andfacial expressions in the first encounters and comparing theiroccurrences in the first and second half of the encounters.The results of our study show that the participants alignboth their speech and facial expressions frequently in the firstencounters. Furthermore, the results confirm the hypothesis thatalignment of speech increases during conversations. A similarrelation between familiarity and alignment of facial expressionswas not found in these data. Our results can indicate thatalignment of facial expressions is more immediate than alignmentof speech and thus it occurs independently of familiarity. Thiswould be in line with mirroring studies which show that infantsmirror facial expressions very early in their development.

AB - Overlapping speech in conversations has been seenas a signal of alignment between the conversation participants.Moreover, researchers have suggested that the alignment increaseswith the increasing degree of familiarity of the participants.Similarly, synchronic body behaviors have been studiedespecially in psychological studies. Determining to which extentalignment of verbal and non-verbal behaviors takes place in conversationsin which a large amount of information is exchanged, isimportant a) for understanding how humans communicate andb) providing empirical based models for designing coginfocomsystems which interact and support humans in the process ofacquiring and sharing information.The present pilot study contributes to this research aimingto determine to what extent alignment of speech and facialexpressions occurs in twelve audio- and video-recorded Danishfirst encounters and whether it increases when the participantsget more acquainted as suggested, at least for speech, in theliterature. Alignment of verbal and non verbal behaviors isinvestigated by extracting overlapping spoken contributions andfacial expressions in the first encounters and comparing theiroccurrences in the first and second half of the encounters.The results of our study show that the participants alignboth their speech and facial expressions frequently in the firstencounters. Furthermore, the results confirm the hypothesis thatalignment of speech increases during conversations. A similarrelation between familiarity and alignment of facial expressionswas not found in these data. Our results can indicate thatalignment of facial expressions is more immediate than alignmentof speech and thus it occurs independently of familiarity. Thiswould be in line with mirroring studies which show that infantsmirror facial expressions very early in their development.

M3 - Article in proceedings

SP - 185

EP - 190

BT - Proceeedings of CogInfoCom 2014 • 5th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications

PB - IEEE Signal Processing Society

ER -