2011 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Measuring acoustic-prosodic entrainment with respect to multiple levels and dimensions

Levitan, Rivka; Hirschberg, Julia Bell

In conversation, speakers become more like each other in various dimensions. This phenomenon, commonly called entrainment, coordination, or alignment, is widely believed to be crucial to the success and naturalness of human interactions. We investigate entrainment in four acoustic and prosodic dimensions. We explore whether speakers coordinate with each other in these dimensions over the conversation as a whole as well as on a turn-by-turn basis and in both relative and absolute terms, and whether this coordination improves over the course of the conversation.