Reading Aloud in Human-Computer Interaction: How Spatial Distribution of Digital Text Units at an Interactive Tabletop Contributes to the Participants’ Shared Understanding

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how the spatial distribution of written informings in a serious game activity at an interactive tabletop (ITT) induces participants to read aloud interactionally relevant information to each other in the process of co-constructing a shared understanding. Engaging in an unfamiliar game activity, the participants are all equally dependent on written informings from the interface that serve as a game manual and provide crucial information for jointly achieving the game task(s). When it comes to making use of these written informings, we find the participants to read them aloud, making them accountable within the group. Our findings from multimodal video analysis of two reading-aloud cases suggest that the written informing’s directionality and distribution (here, either designed as ‘distributed’ or ‘shared’ among the interface) regulate the participants’ access to information. And that participants who cannot visually access the information they are interested in reading (aloud) co-organize fine-grained joint successive actions build on and actualized by read-aloud utterances. These joint actions allow them to align their orientation and share their understanding of game activity-relevant content.