Interactive Communication -- cross-disciplinary perspectives from psychology, acoustics, and media technology

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive cross-disciplinary overview of interactive communication, integrating psychological, acoustic, and media technology perspectives to understand human and technical interactions across various contexts.

Contribution

It offers an integrated framework combining psychological mechanisms with acoustic and technological constraints, bridging gaps between different research disciplines on interactive communication.

Findings

Theoretical models of verbal, nonverbal, and multimodal communication.

Methodological approaches for measuring communicative synchrony.

Applications in assistive listening and conversational agents.

Abstract

Interactive communication (IC), i.e., the reciprocal exchange of information between two or more interactive partners, is a fundamental part of human nature. As such, it has been studied across multiple scientific disciplines with different goals and methods. This article provides a cross-disciplinary primer on contemporary IC that integrates psychological mechanisms with acoustic and media-technological constraints across theory, measurement, and applications. First, we outline theoretical frameworks that account for verbal, nonverbal and multimodal aspects of IC, including distinctions between face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. Second, we summarize key methodological approaches, including behavioral, cognitive, and experiential measures of communicative synchrony and acoustic signal quality. Third, we discuss selected applications, i.e. assistive listening technologies, conversational agents, alongside ethical considerations. Taken together, this review highlights how human capacities and technical systems jointly shape IC, consolidating concepts, findings, and challenges that have often been discussed in separate lines of research.