Typed versus Spoken Conversations in a Multi-party Epistemic Game

Multi-party chat is a standard feature of popular online games and is increasingly available in collaborative learning environments, including epistemic games. However, little is known about the linguistic qualities of group conversation, especially regarding modality of communication. This paper addresses the differences between spoken and typed conversations as high school students interacted with the epistemic game Urban Science. CohMetrix analyses showed that speech was associated with more global aspects of text (narrativity, cohesion) whereas typed input was associated with more local aspects (syntactic simplicity, word concreteness). The spoken conversations were also more verbose than typed conversations. These findings suggest that the modality in group communication should be considered, particularly with respect to the breaks in discourse cohesion that are more prominent in typed group chat.