Lost in transmittance: How transmission lag enhances and deteriorates multilingual collaboration

Naomi Yamashita*, Andy Echenique, Toru Ishida, Ari Hautasaari

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

25 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Previous research has shown that audio communication is particularly difficult for non-native speakers (NNS) during multilingual collaborations. Especially when audio signals become distorted, NNS are overburdened by not only having to communicate with imperfect language skills, but also compensating for the deteriorations. Under these faulty audio conditions, NNS need to pay extra time and effort to understand the conversation. In order to give NNS more time to process conversations, we tested the insertion of silent gaps (from 0.2 to 0.4 seconds) between conversational turns. First, gaps were inserted into a previously taped conversation, resulting in a significant improvement of NNS's understanding of the conversation. Second, gaps were inserted during a real-time audio conference by adding artificial delay between native speakers. The results show that the added delays have a combination of beneficial and detrimental effects for both native and non-native speakers. The findings have implications towards how audio conferencing can be improved for NNS.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCSCW 2013 - Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Pages923-934
Number of pages12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event2013 2nd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2013 - San Antonio, TX, United States
Duration: 2013 Feb 232013 Feb 27

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Conference

Conference2013 2nd ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Antonio, TX
Period13/2/2313/2/27

Keywords

  • Audio conferencing
  • Delay
  • Mental resource
  • Non-native speakers
  • Silent gaps

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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