ABSTRACT
The “speech application” is one part of the larger human machine interface (HMI) which allows for verbal interaction with a vehicle in the accomplishment of particular tasks. In order for the “speech application” to be usable in a satisfying fashion, it must be able to recognize the speech of the occupants, which will vary culturally given local flow of dialogue, regional accents, cultural varieties in intonation, prosody, and pacing. Research on the influence of culture on design and usability has frequently relied on theories that consider culture in terms of macro-level universal dimensions. In this work, we discuss a framework for investigating cultural variation in communication drawing on ethnographic and naturalistic data. This framework, based in the Ethnography of Communication and Cultural Discourse Analysis, examines the details of everyday communication in order to discover the cultural patterns, norms, and preferences of culturally based interaction that is active in a specific community. In this paper, we describe how this framework could be the basis of a model for analyzing the role of culture in in-car communication.
