Honors College Thesis
 

The Relationship between Attention and Rapport in Conversation with AAC Users

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/honors_college_theses/k0698948v

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  • Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices enable people who cannot speak to communicate with others. Unfortunately, they are tedious to use and are believed to lower the satisfaction of interacting with others. This thesis attempted to document the impact that AAC devices have on social interactions, in the hope of developing ways to improve the AAC user experience through innovative engineering and/or user training. Twenty-five female-female pairs of participants were video recorded having two five-minute conversations. One was asked to communicate through an AAC device. Partners of AAC users reported less rapport the more time they spent looking around the room suggesting that the gaze behavior of individuals was critical to the interaction experience. Participants also spent less time looking at the AAC users face during the second interaction in which the AAC input device was an Xbox controller, which simulated the tedious and challenging interfaces that are commonly used. Not surprisingly, all participants reported much less rapport during this second, more communicatively challenging interaction. This pattern of results suggested that, as the AAC interface requires more time to compose each statement the attention of conversational partner will decline, which will lead to less rapport and less satisfying social interactions. Key Words: AAC, attention, conversation, gaze, rapport
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  • OSUAA and URISC
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