2014 Reports

Prosodic Entrainment in Mandarin and English: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison

Xia, Zhihua; Levitan, Rivka; Hirschberg, Julia Bell

Entrainment is the propensity of speakers to begin behaving like one another in conversation. We identify evidence of entrainment in a number of acoustic and prosodic dimensions in conversational speech of Standard American English speakers and Mandarin Chinese speakers. We compare entrainment in the Columbia Games Corpus and the Tongji Games Corpus and find similar patterns of global and local entrainment in both. Differences appear primarily in global convergence.