Listeners as co-narrators.

Abstract

A collaborative theory of narrative story-telling was tested in two experiments that examined what listeners do and their effect on the narrator. In 63 unacquainted dyads (81 women and 45 men), a narrator told his or her own close-call story. The listeners made 2 different kinds of listener responses: Generic responses included nodding and vocalizations such as "mhm." Specific responses, such as wincing or exclaiming, were tightly connected to (and served to illustrate) what the narrator was saying at the moment. In experimental conditions that distracted listeners from the narrative content, listeners made fewer responses, especially specific ones, and the narrators also told their stories significantly less well, particularly at what should have been the dramatic ending. Thus, listeners were co-narrators both through their own specific responses, which helped illustrate the story, and in their apparent effect on the narrator's performance. The results demonstrate the importance of moment-by-moment collaboration in face-to-face dialogue.

Modeling Latent Discriminative Dynamic of Multi-dimensional Affective Signals

“…As discussed in Section 3, we selected a subset of visual communicative signals which were shown to be useful when analyzing dyadic interactions [2,11,1] and could be estimated robustly by an off-the-shelf sensing software. In our experiments, we processed each video sequence with the Omron OKAO Vision software library [17] to automatically extract the following facial features: horizontal eye gaze direction (degrees), vertical eye gaze direction (degrees), smile intensity (from 0-100) and head tilt (degrees).…”

Co-constructing Grounded Symbols—Feedback and Incremental Adaptation in Human–Agent Dialogue

“…A proposed conceptualisation that is easily understood by an interlocutor can be accepted right away, even before it has been fully explained; a poor conceptualisation proposal, on the other hand, can be altered as soon as difficulties become apparent or can even be rejected before more time is spent on it. This streamlines and speeds up the symbol grounding process [2].…”

When to Elicit Feedback in Dialogue: Towards a Model Based on the Information Needs of Speakers

“…Under this assumption, it would be sufficient for feedback elicitation cue placement to be governed by simple rules. Backchannels are, however, just one type of feedback (termed a generic listener response by Bavelas and colleagues [2]). Feedback signals can be much richer in their form [21] and often fulfil specific functions [2] that go beyond the backchannel.…”

“…Backchannels are, however, just one type of feedback (termed a generic listener response by Bavelas and colleagues [2]). Feedback signals can be much richer in their form [21] and often fulfil specific functions [2] that go beyond the backchannel. By strategically placing feedback elicitation cues in a turn, speakers can thus use them as a way of querying information from listeners.…”