This paper concerns non-verbal communication, and describes especially the use of eye-gaze to signal turn-taking and feedback in conversational settings. Eye-gaze supports smooth interaction by providing signals that the interlocutors interpret with respect to such conversational functions as taking turns and giving feedback. New possibilities to study the effect of eye-gaze on the interlocutor...

Metaphorical creativity does not constitute a static property of discourse. It is an interactive dynamic process created online. There has been a lack of research concerning online produced metaphorical creativity. This paper intends to account for metaphorical creativity in online talk-in-interaction as a dynamic process that emerges as discourse unfolds. It brings together insights from the e...

Much of the research exploring the features of speech that distinguish intelligibility ratings has focused on monologic speech production. This study considers whether the use of specific interactive features in task-based interaction influences interlocutors' ratings of intelligibility. Five dyads completed an information gap task and rated their partners' intelligibility following task comple...

The present study compares prosodic features of child-directed speech (CDS) and foreigner-directed speech (FDS), to examine whether FDS is a derivative of CDS as suggested in sociolinguistic studies. Twelve female speakers completed a simple referential communication task addressed to an imaginary adult, an imaginary foreigner, and an imaginary child. The results showed that, compared to the ad...

The paper focuses on the interlocutors' self-evaluation in Finnish and Estonian first encounter dialogues. It studies affective and emotive impressions of the participants after they have met the partner for the first time, and presents comparison of the evaluation along the gender, age and education parameters. The results bring forward some statistically significant differences between the tw...

This paper focuses on the study of the convergence between characteristics of speech segments– i.e. spectral characteristics of speech sounds – during live interactions between speaking dyads. The interaction data has been collected using an original verbal game called ‘verbal dominoes’ that provides a dense sampling of the acoustic spaces of the interlocutors. Two methods for characterizing ph...

We learn language from our social environment. In general, the more sources we have, the less informative each of them is, and the less weight we should assign it. If this is the case, people who interact with fewer others should be more susceptible to the influence of each of their interlocutors. This paper tests whether indeed people who interact with fewer other people have more malleable ph...

Children acquire information, especially about the culture in which they are being raised, by listening to other people. Recent evidence has shown that young children are selective learners who preferentially accept information, especially from informants who are likely to be representative of the surrounding culture. However, the extent to which children understand this process of information ...

An intelligent virtual agent is an intelligent agent with a digital representation and endowed with conversational capabilities; this interactive character exhibits human-like behavior and communicates with humans or virtual interlocutors using verbal and nonverbal modalities such as gesture and speech. Building credible characters requires a multidisciplinary approach, the behaviors that must ...

This study uses the multi-level coding of a designed corpus of unscripted task-oriented dialogues to demonstrate that time to respond (Inter-Move Interval, IMI) and rate of disfluency behave like psycholinguistic measures, reaction time and error rate, in reflecting the speakers’ cognitive burdens. Multiple-regression analyses show that IMI is sensitive to social distance between interlocutors,...