Behavioural Adaptation Towards Foreign Virtual Agents in VR - the Impact of Non-Native Speech

This paper presents an interaction study that investigates whether participants adapt their verbal and non-verbal behaviour towards an IVA that shows non-native speech patterns in a way that is congruent to observations previously made in human-human and human-agent interaction. In a between-subjects design, participants either interacted with an IVA speaking native-accented German, an IVA speaking German with a non-native accent, or an IVA speaking grammatically incorrect German with a non-native accent in VR. The results reveal that participants partly adapt their verbal and non-verbal behaviour when interacting with the IVAs with non-native speech patterns, which constitutes important implications for the cost-efficient design of enculturated IVAs.