Elizabeth S. Veinott
Judith Olson
Gary M. Olson
ABSTRACT
More and more organizations are forming teams that are not co-located. These teams communicate via email, fax, telephone and audio conferences, and sometimes video. The question often arises whether the cost of video is worth it. Previous research has shown that video makes people more satisfied with the work, but it doesnt help the quality of the work itself. There is one exception; negotiation tasks are measurably better with video. In this study, we show that the same effect holds for a more subtle form of negotiation, when people have to negotiate meaning in a conversation. We compared the performance and communication of people explaining a map route to each other. Half the pairs have video and audio connections, half only audio. Half of the pairs were native speakers of English; the other half were non-native speakers, those presumably who have to negotiate meaning more. The results showed that non-native speaker pairs did benefit from the video; native speakers did not. Detailed analysis of the conversational strategies showed that with video, the non-native speaker pairs spent proportionately more effort negotiating common ground.
- 1.Anderson, A. H., Bader, M., Bard, E., Boyle, E., Doherty, G., Garrod, S., Issard, S., Kwotko, J., McAllister, J., Miller, J., Sotillo, C., & Thompson, H. (1991). The HCRC MAP Task corpus. La~guage and Speech, 34, 351-360.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- 2.Bekker, M. M., Olson, J., & Olson, G. M. (1995). Analysis of gestures in face-to-face design team provides guidance for how to use groupware in design. Proceedings of the Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems, DIS'95, 157-166. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 3.Boyle, E., Anderson, A. & Newlands, A. (1994). The effects of visibility on dialogue perforraance in a cooperative problem solving task, Language and Speech, 37,1, 1-20.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 4.Brown, G., Anderson, A. H., Yule, G., & Shilcock, R. (1984). Teaching talk. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- 5.Chapanis, A. (1975). Interactive, human communication. Scientific American, 232, 36-42.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 6.Chapanis, A. Ochsman, R.B., Parrish, R. N.& Weeks, G. D. (1972). Studies in interactive communication: The effects of four communication mocles on the behavior of teams during a co-operative problem solving. Human Factors, 14, 487-509.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 7.Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. (pp. 92-125) Cambridge England: Cambridge Universi12t Press.Google Scholar
- 8.Clark, H. H. & Wilks-Gibbs, D. (1986) Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition, 22, 1-39.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 9.Doherty-Sneedon, G., Anderson, A., O'Malley, C., Langton, S., Garrod, S., & Bruce, V. (1997). Face-to- Face and video mediated communication: A comparison of dialogue structure and task performance, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 3, 2, 105-123.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 10.Edigo, C. (1990). Teleconferencing as a technology to support co-operative work: Its possibilities and limitations. In J. Gallegher, R. E. Kraut, & C. Edigo (Eds.) Intellectual teamwork: Social and technological foundations of cooperative work (pp. 351-371). Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates. Google Scholar
- 11.Farmer, S. M. & Hyatt, C. W. (1994). Effects of task language demand and task complexity on computermediated work groups, Small Group Research, 25, 3, 331-336.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 12.Finn, K., Sellen, A., & Wilbur, S. (1997). Videomediated communication. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 13.Green & Williges, R. C. (1975). Evaluation of alternative media used with a groupware editor in a simulated telecommunication environment. Human Factors, 37(3), 283-289.Google Scholar
- 14.O'Connaill, B., Whittker, S. & Wilbur, S. (1993). Conversations over video conferences" An evaluation of video mediated interaction. Human-Computer Interaction, 8, 389-428.Google ScholarDigital Library
- 15.Olson, G. M. & Olson, J. S. (199 i). User Centered design of collaboration technology. Journal of Organizational Computing, 1( 1 ), 61-84.Google Scholar
- 16.Olson, G. M., Olson, J.S., Carter, M. & Storrosten, M. (1992). Small group design meetings: An analysis of collaboration. Human Computer Interaction, 7, 347- 374.Google ScholarDigital Library
- 17.Olson, J., Olson, G. & Meader, D. (1995). What mix of video and audio is useful for remote real-time work. In Proceedings of Computer and Human Interaction'95, (Denver, CO, May 1995), ACM Press, 362-368. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 18.Reisberg, D., McLean, J. & Goldfield, A. (1987). Easy to hear but hard to understand: A lip-reading advantage with intact auditory stimuli. In R. Campbell & B. Dodd (Eds.) Hearing by Eye: The psychology of lip-reading. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
- 19.Short, j., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1976) The social psychology of telecommunications. London: Wiley.Google Scholar
- 20.Varonis, E. M. and S. M. Gass (I 985) "Nonnative/Non-native Conversations: A Model for Negotiation of Meaning", Applied Linguistics 6(1): 71-90.Google Scholar
- 21.Veinott, E. S., Olson, J. S., Olson, G. M. & Fu, X. (1997). Video Matters! When communication is stressed video helps. In Extended Abstracts of Computer and Human Interaction '97, (Atlanta, GA, April 1997), ACM Press, 315-316. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Video helps remote work: speakers who need to negotiate common ground benefit from seeing each other
Recommendations
Video matters!: when communication ability is stressed, video helps
CHI EA '97: CHI '97 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThis study assesses whether remotely located pairs of people working on a collaborative task benefit from using video, looking in particular at people for whom communication is stressed. In this study, we extend the research on video-mediated ...
Developments in Corpus-Based Speech Synthesis: Approaching Natural Conversational Speech
This paper describes the special demands of conversational speech in the context of corpus-based speech synthesis. The author proposed the CHATR system of prosody-based unit-selection for concatenative waveform synthesis seven years ago, and now extends ...
Behavioral Changes in Speakers who are Automatically Captioned in Meetings with Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Peers
ASSETS '18: Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and AccessibilityDeaf and hard of hearing (DHH) individuals face barriers to communication in small-group meetings with hearing peers; we examine generation of captions on mobile devices by automatic speech recognition (ASR). While ASR output displays errors, we study ...
Comments