Experimental Contrastive Pragmatics Using Robots

What is it about?

The paper shows how robots can be used to study pragmatic strategies of speaking across different cultures. In one study, the robot provides bad news, for half of the participants with signs of empathy, for the other half without. The results show that empathy signals are perceived differently across cultures; while empathy signals are generally understood as friendlier and more polite, in some cultures, they are also associated with more formality, and in others with greater professionalism. _x000D_ The second study shows that feedback is provided differently even in neighboring countries, and the different feedback styles are interpreted quite differently, which often means negative consequences for the respective speaker. The two studies show that using robots can be very helpful to carry out experiments in contrastive pragmatics.

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