Verbal Cues of Involvement in Dyadic Same-culture and Cross-culture Instant Messaging Conversations Duyen T. Nguyen Human Computer Interaction Institute Carnegie Mellon University tdnguyen@andrew.cmu.edu Susan R. Fussell Department of Communication Cornell University sfussell@cornell.edu ABSTRACT This paper explores how people in same-culture and cross- culture pairs use verbal cues to express involvement in dyadic text-based Instant Messaging (IM) conversations. We report an experimental study with same-culture and cross-culture pairs of American and Chinese participants, in which we manipulated the participants’ level of involvement in IM conversations using a distraction task (an online game). We found that American and Chinese participants used verbal involvement cues, such as cognitive words and definite articles, differently to express involvement. Our results provide suggestions for improving international, multicultural team collaboration using computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools. Author Keywords Involvement; CMC; conversation; communication processes; verbal cues; intercultural collaboration ACM Classification Keywords H5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces: Computer- supported cooperative work General Terms Experimentation; Human Factors INTRODUCTION Conversational involvement is defined as the extent to which participants are immersed and engaged with their partners and with the ongoing dialog [7], and can be perceived from both the non-verbal and verbal cues an interactant exhibits. An uninvolved interactant may be viewed negatively by his or her conversational partners. Many people find conversations with uninvolved partners less satisfying than those with highly involved partners [3], as suggested in the phrase “it’s like I’m talking to myself”. For two people working together on a team, involvement in conversations is thus especially important, as the level of involvement of a team member in work-related discussion influences the teammate’s impressions of him or her, their interpersonal relationships, and their willingness to collaborate [3, 16]. With the rising popularity and various benefits of global collaboration today, multinational work teams, consisting of members from different cultures and speaking different languages collaborate via computer-mediated communication (CMC) channels more and more, due to the low cost and high efficiency in coordinating meetings [11]. While in face-to-face interaction non-verbal behaviors, such as direct eye contact, animated facial expressions, or forward lean, are important for the expression and interpretation of involvement [17, 22], in most text-based CMC, such audio and video cues are not supported. Without these non-verbal cues, however, several studies found that participants can still express emotions, status, and even involvement [26, 19]. Nguyen & Fussell [19] found that in text-based IM conversations, subtle verbal cues such as the high frequency of assent words and low frequency of singular first-person pronouns (e.g., “I”, “me”) are significant indications of involvement. For example, in an experimental study, conversationalists who used many assent words and few “I” pronouns reported being more involved in the IM conversation [19]. They were also rated as being more involved than those who used few assent words and many “I” pronouns by third-person observers, who watched a screen recording of the conversation. However, most studies of conversational involvement have not considered cultural differences in communication styles that may influence the use of involvement cues [21, 5]. For example, the use of “I” vs. “we” pronouns has been shown to differ across cultures [31]. In addition, verbal cues such as the word “yeah” can be interpreted differently by members of different cultures [33]. Given such culture differences in communication styles, the results about the verbal indicators of involvement from previous studies with mostly North American participants may not apply to participants from other cultures such as China or Japan. Moreover, very few studies examined how verbal involvement cues are used in intercultural pairs in which a North American participant converses with an East Asian participant. This study aims to bridge this important literature gap. We begin with an overview of the concept of interaction involvement, verbal cues of involvement, and cultural http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2631488.2631496 Intercultural Small Group Collaboration CABS'14, August 20–22, 2014, Kyoto, Japan 41 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CABS 2014, August 20-22, 2014, Kyoto, Japan. Copyright © ACM 978-1-4503-2557-8/14/08...$15.00.