Alignment of communicative behaviors and familiarity in first encounters

Overlapping speech in conversations has been seen as a signal of alignment between the conversation participants. Moreover, researchers have suggested that the alignment increases with the increasing degree of familiarity of the participants. Similarly, synchronic body behaviors have been studied especially in psychological studies. Determining to which extent alignment of verbal and non-verbal behaviors takes place in conversations in which a large amount of information is exchanged, is important a) for understanding how humans communicate and b) providing empirical based models for designing coginfocom systems which interact and support humans in the process of acquiring and sharing information. The present pilot study contributes to this research aiming to determine to what extent alignment of speech and facial expressions occurs in twelve audio and video-recorded Danish first encounters and whether it increases when the participants get more acquainted as suggested, at least for speech, in the literature. Alignment of verbal and non verbal behaviors is investigated by extracting overlapping spoken contributions and facial expressions in the first encounters and comparing their occurrences in the first and second half of the encounters. The results of our study show that the participants align both their speech and facial expressions frequently in the first encounters. Furthermore, the results confirm the hypothesis that alignment of speech increases during conversations. A similar relation between familiarity and alignment of facial expressions was not found in these data. Our results can indicate that alignment of facial expressions is more immediate than alignment of speech and thus it occurs independently of familiarity. This would be in line with mirroring studies which show that infants mirror facial expressions very early in their development.