Adapted Foreigner-directed Communication towards Virtual Agents
18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2018), page 59-64. ACM, (2018)Abstract
People tend to adapt to their conversation partners. In mixed-cultural settings, with a native and a non-native speaker, adaptation can manifest itself in the usage of simplified language or increased usage of non-verbal scaffolding to foster understanding. In this contribution, we address the question whether the phenomenon of AFC (adapted, foreigner-directed communication) is also shown towards a virtual agent. We therefore implemented a demonstrator with a local and a foreign agent that interact with human users in a direction giving scenario. A user study revealed that participants behaved differently towards the two agents and adapted both, their verbal and their non-verbal behaviour. We are thus confident, that our demonstrator is well suited to systematically study AFC.
