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 su...

The ATAROS project aims to identify acoustic signals of stance-taking in order to inform the development of automatic stance recognition in natural speech. Due to the typically low frequency of stance-taking in existing corpora that have been used to investigate related phenomena such as subjectivity, we are creating an audio corpus of unscripted conversations between dyads as they complete col...

When perceiving stimuli, self-centred and decentred perspectives can be adopted. In the present study, we investigate whether perceivers have a natural perspective that constrains their spatial perception, with some people perceiving better with self-centred than decentred perspectives and vice versa for other people. We used a recognition task of tactile ambiguous letters (b, d, p, and q) pres...

People tend to avoid exposed disagreement in conversation. This is normally attributed to politeness strategies that mitigate the potential face-threat created by direct disagreement with a conversational partner. In reported speech the pressure for mitigation of negative responses is removed, leading to the prediction that reported speech should contain more exposed disagreement. However, conc...

Academic essays entail taking a stance on the truth value of propositions. Epistemic adverbs deal with the speaker's assessment of the truth value of propositions. Employing a corpus-based approach with descriptive statistics and qualitative description, this study explored the use of epistemic stance adverbs in academic essays written by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners. Follow...

In this paper, we attempt to make a distinction between egocentrism and allocentrism in social cognition, based on the distinction that is made in visuo-spatial perception. We propose that it makes a difference to mentalizing whether the other person can be understood using an egocentric ("you") or an allocentric ("he/she/they") stance. Within an egocentric stance, the other person is represent...

Technical systems are intuitively understood as rather different from organizations. Yet, this holds merely for their implementation. It appears to be very convenient to consider technical systems as ’automated’ social systems. The first results of a research project, investigating the benefits of this ’social stance’ towards technical systems, are reported upon in this paper. Two example techn...