Ingroup and Outgroup Accent Study

1

• Ingroup and Outgroup Accent Study
• Seema Swamy
• Kwan Min Lee

2
Key Questions

• Does accent make a difference?
• Ingroup
• Outgroup
• Do men and women behave differently when ingroup
  and outgroup accents are used?
• If so, in what ways?

3
Importance of the Research

• Intercultural studies
• Do computers manifest cultural characteristics?
• How do people from different cultures interact
  with voices from similar or different cultural
  backgrounds?
• Does this behavior translate to interaction with
  computers?
• Interest to linguists
• Do voice characteristics matter?
• inflections
• intonations
• prosody

4
Importance of the Research

• Gender Issues
• Are women and men indeed from Venus and Mars? If
  so, in what ways?
• Psychological Issues
• Cool attitudinal and behavioral measures
• Test ingroup and outgroup behavior
• Design Issues
• Answers seminal questions about type of voice
  that should be used
• Helps in designing for specific audiences

5
Context

• Domain
• Computer-based interview
• Technology
• CSLU toolkit
• Speech recognition technology
• Questionnaire
• Voice input
• Paper-and-pencil

6
Procedure

• Practice session
• Open-ended
• Closed-ended questions
• Participant responds to self-disclosure measures
• Open-ended disclosure items
• Paper-pencil questionnaire

7
2 x 2 design

• Output
• American accent
• Swedish accent
• Gender
• Men
• Women

8
Demo of the Stimulus

• Different voices utilized for output in the study

9
In control
10
BIDR
11
Fun
12
Affect
13
Awful
14
Psychological Implications

• Ingroup and outgroup accents matter
• Men disclose more to outgroup accent
• Social distance theory is valid
• Women disclose to the ingroup accent relatively
  more
• Similarity attraction theory relevant

15
Design Implications

• Gender is a major factor
• Women like speech interfaces more than men
• But men disclose more to the computer than women!
• Design for specific audiences in HCI
• Use outgroup accent output for men
• Ingroup accent output for women

16
Future Research

• Comparative study of data from the Swedish
  participants
• Examine if patterns are similar or different
• To what extent

17
Other Issues to examine

• Internationalization and localization issues in
  HCI
• Does cultural identity manifest itself when text
  and speech are matched or mismatced?