Hoe belangrijk zijn prosodie en synchroniciteit voor gemedieerde communicatie?

What is the relation between the performance of a group executing a task and the communication channel(s) (or: media) they use? With the help of the Media Richness theory we can answer this question: The more successful the use of a rich medium will be, the more complex and difficult the  tasks become. A rich medium is a medium that permits cue variety (the communicators can pass on to each other a variety of communicative signals simultaneously) and synchronicity (the receiver can give feedback immediately).

The MRT has been tested in the framework of management system theories and organizational sociology. That is why investigators focused on effectivity and efficiency of task performance, and neglected the (text)linguistic and interactional aspects of the messages that collaborators send to each other in the process of executing tasks. It is the goal of this project to rectify this deficiency, by exploring the following two lines of thought.

Firstly we assume that prosodic characteristics are important aspects of cue variety, because they give the hearer in an implicit way information about what the speaker considers as important and what not. By consequence we expect that media that pass on prosody will be successfully deployed for tasks where this kind of information is important, such as making a decision about who will be the best candidate housemate. Secondly we assume that a medium that permits immediate feedback will be successful in tasks where the communicators have shared interests. However, if communicators have conflicting interests, the execution of the tasks will be hampered.

Using experiments, we hope to achieve two goals with this project: to understand more fully what the contribution of cue variety and synchronicity is to the process of understanding, and how these contributes to an effective and efficient execution of tasks.