Verbal and nonverbal skills in open communication: Comparing experienced and inexperienced radio duos

Abstract

This paper examines how the difference in talk skill for open communication affects the orientation of the verbal and nonverbal behaviors of the talk partner or audience. An experiment was carried out using multiple radio duos having different levels of talk skill, i.e., experienced and inexperienced. The experiment’s task was conducted in a pseudo-radio setting under three conditions: audience-present talk, audience-absent talk, and audience-absent/post-talk sessions. The speech and body gestures of all participants were video-recorded and analyzed. The results suggest that the different levels of experience in radio talk are expressed in different speech and gesture orientations. These findings seem applicable to the speech- and gesture-expression model for conversational robots, especially for nursing-care robots designed to talk with other robots or cohabitants.