On the basis of two-speaker spontaneous conversations, it is shown that the distributions of both pauses and speech-overlaps of telephone and faceto-face dialogues have different statistical properties. Pauses in a face-to-face dialogue last up to 4 times longer than pauses in telephone conversations in functionally comparable conditions. There is a high correlation (0.88 or larger) between the...

Virtual humans, with realistic behaviors and increasingly humanlike social skills, evoke in users a range of social behaviors normally only seen in human face-to-face interactions. One of the key challenges in creating such virtual humans is giving them human-like conversational skills. Traditional conversational virtual humans usually make turn-taking decisions depending on explicit cues, such...

In order to ensure smooth turn-taking between conversational participants, interlocutors must have ways of providing information to one another about whether they have finished speaking or intend to continue. The current work investigates Swedish speakers’ use of hand gestures in conjunction with turn change or turn hold in unrestricted, spontaneous speech. As has been reported by other researc...

Kykyri, Virpi-Liisa Helping Clients to Help Themselves. A Discursive Perspective to Process Consulting Practices in Multi-party Settings Jyväskylä, University of Jyväskylä, 2008, 76 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research ISSN 0075-4625; 330) ISBN 978-951-39-3082-0 (PDF), 978-951-39-3071-4 (nid.) Finnish Summary Diss. This study approaches process consulting work as c...