Presentations

Abstract

Human communication requires interlocutors to mutually understand each other. Previous research has suggested inter-brain synchrony as an important feature of social interaction, since it has been observed during joint attention, speech interactions and cooperative tasks. Nonetheless, it is still unknown whether inter-brain synchrony is actually related to successful face-to-face communication. Here, we use dual-EEG to study if inter-brain synchrony is modulated during episodes of successful and unsuccessful communication in clear and noisy communication settings. Dyads performed a tangram-based referential communication task with and without background noise, while both their EEG and audiovisual behavior was recorded. Other-initiated repairs were annotated in the audiovisual data and were used as indexes of unsuccessful and successful communication. More specifically, we compared inter-brain synchrony during episodes of miscommunication (repair initiations) and episodes of mutual understanding (repair solutions and acceptance phases) in the clear and the noise condition. We expect that when communication is successful, inter-brain synchrony will be stronger than when communication is unsuccessful, and we expect that these patterns will be most pronounced in the noise condition. Results are currently being analyzed and will be presented and discussed with respect to the inter-brain neural signatures underlying the process of mutual understanding in face-to-face conversation.

Abstract

Traditionally, language comprehension has been studied as a solitary and unimodal activity. Here, we investigate language comprehension as a joint activity, i.e., in a dynamic social context involving multiple participants in different roles with different perspectives, while taking into account the multimodal nature of facetoface communication. We simulated a triadic communication context involving a speaker alternating her gaze between two different recipients, conveying information not only via speech but gesture as well. Participants thus viewed videorecorded speechonly or speech+gesture utterances referencing objects (e.g., “he likes the laptop”/+TYPING ON LAPTOPgesture) when being addressed (direct gaze) or unaddressed (averted gaze). The videoclips were followed by two object images (laptoptowel). Participants’ task was to choose the object that matched the speaker’s message (i.e., laptop). Unaddressed recipients responded significantly slower than addressees for speechonly utterances. However, perceiving the same speech accompanied by gestures sped them up to levels identical to that of addressees. Thus, when speech processing suffers due to being unaddressed, gestures become more prominent and boost comprehension of a speaker’s spoken message. Our findings illuminate how participants process multimodal language and how this process is influenced by eye gaze, an important social cue facilitating coordination in the joint activity of conversation.