Can Graphical Interaction Affect Mutual Understanding

In this paper we propose a graphical text chat system which supports mutual understanding between users. Text chat is a very popular and widely used as a communication tool for online communications around the world. Not only text messages but also graphical ones are available in recent chat systems, and in fact many graphical text chat systems have been proposed so far. However, whether and how such graphical text chat systems would contribute to supporting mutual understanding between users is not revealed. In this study, we developed the graphical text chat system intended to facilitate these effects. The developed system enables users to exchange interpretations of concepts contained in each other’s text messages as images. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed system could support mutual understanding between users from both speaker and listener viewpoints.