The talk presents my recent socio-linguistic model of Human-Machine Interaction (HMI, Lotze 2025), examining the interplay of technological affordances, user cognitive awareness, and language strategies.
The model features three continua: technological affordances, users’ cognitive awareness, and language strategies. The first dimension evaluates the anthropomorphism degree of the system, including linguistic anthropomorphism and therefore tries to integrate Ruijten‘s et al. (2014/2019) Rasch-scale of human perception of anthropomorphic designs. The second dimension explores users’ cognitive awareness, ranging from pre-conscious alignment to conscious strategies. The third dimension depicts a continuum of user language, from pre-conscious alignment (Gandolfi et al. 2023) and linguistic routines and behaviors, transferred from HHC (CASA: Reeves and Nass 1996; MASA: Lombard and Xu 2021) to various simplification strategies as robot-directed speech (RDS), simplified registers (SR) (Fischer 2011), and computer talk (CT) (Zoeppritz 1985).
Within this framework, we discuss the case of athropomorphisation and relational work in the users‘ linguistic behaviour towards the AI as an example, that is able to illustrate the validity of the model and introduce our second model, which focuses on the interconnectedness of antropomorphisation and the degree of politeness in users’ speech (Lotze & Greilich in prep.). The talk argues from a diachronic perspective that HMI language evolution is influenced not only by anthropomorphic technology and user awareness but also by language variation, change, and societal factors. Therefore, the results of numerous studies of my own research group conducted between 2000 and the present (with a particular focus on Lotze 2016) will be summarized and interpreted in light of the model.