Differences in Listener Responses between Procedural and Narrative Tasks

In the long tradition of corpus based research on listener behavior, whether it entails linguistic analysis or social signal processing, many different tasks have been used during the recording of the corpus. So far in no study the task which has been given to the participants has been an independent variable and no studies have looked into the effect of this variable on listener responses. In this paper we present the results of our comparison between listening behavior elicited by procedural and narrative tasks which were used during the recording of our MultiLis corpus. We will show that listeners in the procedural tasks show more agreement in their responses than listeners in the narrative tasks. Furthermore we will show that the long procedural task elicits more responses per minute than the short procedural task. We will reflect on these results in light of cognitive load and grounding theory.