Effects of Language Variety on Personality Perception in Embodied Conversational Agents (original) (raw)

2014, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

In this paper, we investigate the effects of language variety in combination with bodily behaviour on the perceived personality of a virtual agent. In particular, we explore changes on the extroversion-introversion dimension of personality. An online perception study was conducted featuring a virtual character with different levels of expressive body behaviour and different synthetic voices representing German and Austrian language varieties. Clear evidence was found that synthesized language variety, and gestural expressivity influence the human perception of an agent's extroversion. Whereby Viennese and Austrian standard language are perceived as more extrovert than it is the case for the German standard.