Shared Understanding and Synchrony Emergence - Synchrony as an Indice of the Exchange of Meaning between Dialog Partners

Synchrony is claimed by psychology as a crucial parameter of any social interaction. In dialog interactions, the synchrony between non-verbal behaviours of interactants is claimed to account for the quality of the interaction: to give to human a feeling of natural interaction, an agent must be able to synchronise on appropriate time. The synchronisation occurring during non-verbal iteractions has recently been modelised as a phenonomenon emerging from the coupling between interactants. We propose here, and test in simulation, a dynamical model of verbal communication which links the emergence of synchrony between non-verbal behaviours to the level of meaning exchanged through words by interactants: if partners of a dyad understand each other, synchrony emerges, whereas if they do not understand, synchrony is disrupted. In addition to retrieve the fact that synchrony emergence within a dyad of agents depends on their level of shared understanding, our tests pointed two noteworthy properties of synchronisation phenomenons: first, as well as synchrony accounts for mutual understanding and good interaction, di-synchrony accounts for misunderstanding; second, synchronisation and di-synchronisation emerging from mutual understanding are very quick phenomenons.