The results of a pilot study comparing linguistic behavior of speakers in telephone-only and
multimodal communicative environments, are reported. The subjects, native speakers of
Japanese, conducted goal-oriented conversations in each environment. Linguistic
differences (disfluency rates, and use of intention types, syntactic structures, and deictic
expressions) and paralinguistic differences (ease of use, and utilization of media) are
discussed. Suggestions are made for incorporating these findings into the design of …

We report on a comparison of English and Japanese speech in goal-directed conversation
in both telephone-only and multimedia environments. Factors considered are: disfluency,
distribution of syntactic sentence types, deictic expressions and distribution of utterance
intention types. Responses to a subjective survey of subjects' reactions to the
communication modes are also discussed. Results have implications for constructing
models of speaker and hearer, as well as for understanding the role of visual information in …