{"pk":30174,"title":"Top-down effect of apparent humanness on vocal alignment toward human anddevice interlocutors","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Humans are now regularly speaking to voice-activatedartificially intelligent (voice-AI) assistants. Yet, ourunderstanding of the cognitive mechanisms at play duringspeech interactions with a voice-AI, relative to a real human,interlocutor is an understudied area of research. The presentstudy tests whether top-down guise of “apparent humanness”affects vocal alignment patterns to human and text-to-speech(TTS) voices. In a between-subjects design, participants heardeither 4 naturally-produced or 4 TTS voices. Apparenthumanness guise varied within-subject. Speaker guise wasmanipulated via a top-down label with images, either of twopictures of voice-AI systems (Amazon Echos) or two humantalkers. Vocal alignment in vowel duration revealed top-downeffects of apparent humanness guise: participants showedgreater alignment to TTS voices when presented with a deviceguise (“authentic guise”), but lower alignment in the twoinauthentic guises. Results suggest a dynamic interplay ofbottom-up and top-down factors in human and voice-AIinteraction.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"vocal alignment; apparent guise; voice-activatedartificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems; human-computerinteraction"}],"section":"Papers accepted as Posters, appearing in proceedings only","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hk1q3q3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Georgia","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zellou","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Davis","department":""},{"first_name":"Michelle","middle_name":"","last_name":"Cohn","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Davis","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/30174/galley/20028/download/"}]}