藤原, 伸彦

山口, 洋介

Fujihara, Nobuhiko

Yamaguchi, Yosuke

This study investigated the effect of the type of backchannel utterances (BU) on idea generation for divergent thinking during video-mediated communication. Two types of BU were affirmative and non-affirmative. Two categories of divergent thinking task were predicting consequences and devising resolutions. Seventeen undergraduate students participated in the present experiment. Main dependent variables were the number of ideas generated, motivation of speakers for idea generation, and speakers’ perception of listeners’ interest in, agreement with, and admiration of speakers’ ideas. The main results were as follows: There were no significant effect of the type of BU for idea generation, motivation of speakers, and speakers’ perception of listeners’ agreement. Affirmative BU was significantly effective for the perception of listeners’ interest, and marginally significant in effectiveness for the perception of admiration of speakers’ ideas. These findings showed little effectiveness of affirmative BU as a strategy for facilitating idea generation in the case of video-mediated communication unlike with face to face communication. The cause of little difference in the influences of affirmative and non-affirmative BU was interpreted from the viewpoint of sense of copresence of listeners. Unlike face to face communication, speakers may feel less copresent with their listeners in the case of video-mediated communication. Therefore, they tend to pay less attention to listeners’ subtle responses such as BU. This may lead to speakers’ difficulty in discriminating affirmative and non-affirmative BU from listeners. Further investigation is necessary to ascertain the present results using more realistic virtual environment in video-mediated communication which make speakers feel copresent with their listeners.

藤原, 伸彦

山口, 洋介