The impact of mixed-cultural speech on the stereotypical perception of a virtual robot

Abstract

Despite the fact that mixed-cultural backgrounds become of increasing importance in our daily life, the representation of multiple cultural backgrounds in one entity is still rare in socially interactive agents (SIAs). This paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it provides a survey of research on mixed-cultured SIAs. Second, it presents a study investigating how mixed-cultural speech (in this case, non-native accent) influences how a virtual robot is perceived in terms of personality, warmth, competence and credibility. Participants with English or German respectively as their first language watched a video of a virtual robot speaking in either standard English or German-accented English. It was expected that the German-accented speech would be rated more positively by native German participants as well as elicit the German stereotypes credibility and conscientiousness for both German and English participants. Contrary to the expectations, German participants rated the virtual robot lower in terms of competence and credibility when it spoke with a German accent, whereas English participants perceived the virtual robot with a German accent as more credible compared to the version without an accent. Both the native English and native German listeners classified the virtual robot with a German accent as significantly more neurotic than the virtual robot speaking standard English. This work shows that by solely implementing a non-native accent in a virtual robot, stereotypes are partly transferred. It also shows that the implementation of a non-native accent leads to differences in the perception of the virtual robot.

Stereotypical nationality representations in HRI: perspectives from international young adults

“…Participants preferred a voice with an accent matching their own when reading out tourist information about both the Swedish and American destinations. Although the results appear to contradict those on Singaporean Chinese by Batsaikhan et al (2021) and German-accented English by Obremski et al (2022), the comparison is complicated by the differing scenarios. A more direct comparison can be found in work by Niculescu et al (2008), who compared Singaporean English speakers' impressions of a Singaporean English-accented virtual help desk assistant to one with a British English accent.…”

“…Given the stronger influence of accents on perception of individuals' cultural categorization (Rakić et al, 2011), this may have prompted a more critical evaluation of the robot in terms of competence. As described in section 3.1, negative impressions when there is alignment to one's accent (Niculescu et al, 2008;Batsaikhan et al, 2021;Obremski et al, 2022) or dialect (Torre and Maguer, 2020) have been reported in previous work.…”

“…At the same time, however, Swedish participants scored, non-significantly, higher on the quiz with the Swedish robot. There is hence some, inconclusive, evidence that the Swedish subjects were more negative towards the Swedish robot (comparable to the findings by, e.g., Obremski et al, 2022), but despite this recalled more of what the robot had been telling them.…”

“…For Chinese, Batsaikhan et al (2021) showed that Singaporean participants rated Standard Chinese as more trustworthy than Singaporean-accented Chinese. Similarly, Obremski et al (2022) found that German subjects were more negative towards a robot with German-accented English than were native English speakers and that the opposite was true for a native English-speaking robot. Moreover, these perceptions may be altered with extended exposure to diversity.…”