How Turn-Taking Influences the Perception of a Suspect in Police Interviews

We study turn-taking behaviour in non-cooperative dialogue for the development of believable characters in a serious game for conversational skill learning in the police interview context. We describe a perception study to see how participants perceive a suspect’s interpersonal stance, rapport, face, and deception when the turn-taking of the subject varies. We influence the perception of the suspect’s stance by altering the timing of the start of speech with respect to the ending of the interlocutor’s speech. The results of the study contribute to the development of an embodied conversational agent capable of natural humansystem conversation with appropriate turn-taking behaviour.