Miscommunication is often regarded as noise or uninformative in psycholinguistic research. However, Coupland et al. (1991) suggest that miscommunication can provide rich information about how interlocutors come to communicate successfully. Successful communication necessarily needs the individuals involved to coordinate and update their mutual knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and assumptions. H...

In this paper we argue that a clear division between two sources of information— one oriented to world knowledge, the other to linguistic semantics—offers a framework within which mechanisms for modelling the highly flexible relation between language and interpretation necessary for natural discourse can be specified and empirically validated. Moreover, importing techniques and results from for...

During interaction, people coordinate in both verbal (e.g., syntactically and semantically) and nonverbal (e.g., gestural and prosodic) ways. This alignment has been suggested to be a result of grounding or priming. In both cases, visual cues assist understanding. This study explores how widely and how much participants align in a text-only environment. Forty-two participants debated a topic vi...

This paper performs a global analysis of entrainment between dyads in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese (EP), including 48 dialogues, between 24 speakers. Our main goals focus on the acoustic-prosodic similarities between speakers, namely if there are global entrainment cues displayed in the dialogues, if there are degrees of entrainment manifested in distinct sets of features shared am...

Three-person telephone conferences of unacquainted people are conducted by means of pre-defined scenarios providing individual information and goals. Interlocutors rate the likeability of each other after a training session as well as after the actual conference. The recordings of the conferences are manually annotated concerning speaker’s verbal contribution, pauses, and back-channels. Regress...

The increased diffusion of the Internet has made computer-mediated communication (CMC) very popular. However, a difficult question arises for psychologists and communication researchers: "What are the communicative characteristics of CMC?" According to the "cues-filtered-out" approach, CMC lacks the specifically relational features (social cues), which enable the interlocutors to identify corre...

In human-human interaction, the participants’ multimodal behaviour has impact on the interaction as a whole, and similarly in spoken human-robot interactive situations, the interlocutors’ multimodal signals seem to correlate with the user’s assessment of the interaction. We explored in more detail how some aspects of multimodal behaviour (gazing, facial expressions, body posture) can predict th...

A common observation in dialogue research is that people tend to entrain, or align, linguistically with their interlocutors. This phenomenon offers a potentially important way to shape user behavior in human-computer dialogue interactions but little is known about the mechanisms that underlie it and how they may be affected by interlocutor design. We report a Wizard of Oz study that explored ho...

Modeling multimodal face-to-face interaction is a crucial step in the process of building social robots or users-aware Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA). In this context, we present a novel approach for human behavior analysis and generation based on what we called “Incremental Discrete Hidden Markov Model” (IDHMM). Joint multimodal activities of interlocutors are first modeled by a set of D...

Clear speaking styles have been demonstrated to enhance certain acoustic-phonetic features of speech. However, previous work on speech production changes has mainly used interactions with imaginary interlocutors or read speech. In this study, two types of altered speech modes were elicited through a new combination of ‘gap’ and ‘map’ tasks, which leads to unscripted dialogues between interlocut...