Abstract
This article presents an observational study on how some common conversational cues - laughter, fillers, back-channel, silence, and overlapping speech - are used during mobile phone conversations. The observations are performed over the SSPNet Mobile Corpus, a collection of 60 calls between pairs of unacquainted individuals (120 subjects for roughly 12 hours of material in total). The results show that the temporal distribution of the social signals above is not uniform, but it rather reflects the social meaning they carry and convey. In particular, the results show significant use differences depending on factors such as gender, role (caller or receiver), topic, mode of interaction (agreement or disagreement), personality traits and conflict handling style.
Highlights
In general terms, non-verbal communication is the “process of one person stimulating meaning in the mind of another person or persons by means of non-verbal messages” (Richmond et al, 1991)
This article proposes an analysis of the temporal distribution of several non-verbal vocal cues – laughter, fillers, back-channel, silence, and overlapping speech – in the SSPNet Mobile Corpus (Polychroniou et al, 2014), a collection of 60 phone calls between unacquainted individuals (120 subjects in total)
The goal of this work is to show whether the frequency of nonverbal cues changes according to six factors expected to account for the relational context, namely gender, role, topic of conversation, mode of interaction, personality traits, and conflict handling style
Summary
Non-verbal communication is the “process of one person stimulating meaning in the mind of another person or persons by means of non-verbal messages” (Richmond et al, 1991). “the circumstances in which an activity is performed and those in which it never occurs [provide] clues as to what the behavior pattern might be for (its function)” (Martin and Bateson, 2007) For these reasons, this article proposes an analysis of the temporal distribution of several non-verbal vocal cues – laughter (audible contractions, typically rhythmical, of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system), fillers (expressions like “ehm” that fill the time intervals that should be occupied by a word), back-channel (short voiced utterances like “ah-ah” that signal attention and encouragement to continue to others), silence (time intervals during which nobody speaks or produces audible sounds), and overlapping speech (time intervals during which at least two speakers talk at the same time) – in the SSPNet Mobile Corpus (Polychroniou et al, 2014), a collection of 60 phone calls between unacquainted individuals (120 subjects in total). The observations show that the distribution of the cues changes according to the following factors expected to account for the relational context: gender (male vs female), role (caller vs receiver), topic of conversation (task vs social), mode of interaction (agreement vs disagreement ), Big-Five personality traits (McCrae, 2009), and conflict handling style (Rahim, 1983)
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