(Salle F08)
Parrill, Fey
Kimbara, Irene
University of Chicago, Chicago
Mimicry in collaborative interaction :
the impact of entrainment in speech and gesture
on perception and event representation.
This paper examines the effects of perception of mimicry on an
observer’s speech and gesture, via an experimental manipulation
of these variables in a video stimulus. Participants watched a constructed
video in which two people interacted. The degree of mimicry
in speech (lexical, syntactic) and gesture (handshape, motion,
location) across the two interactants was varied. Participants then
described the stimulus, and their speech and gesture were analyzed.
Observers who saw the stimuli with a greater degree of mimicry were
more likely to reproduce the actions and speech of the stimulus.
Furthermore, high-level cognitive effects also emerged : mimicry in
the stimulus resulted in descriptions which were qualitatively different,
and in fewer errors in describing the actions taken in the
stimulus. These results suggest that uptake of meaning and form in
the two expressive modalities shapes the observer’s representation
of the event.
