Entrainment is the tendency of speakers engaged in conversation to align different aspects of their communicative behavior. In this study we explore in more detail a measure of prosodic entrainment defined in previous work, which uses a discrete parametrization of intonational contours defined by the ToBI conventions for prosodic description. We divide this measure into two asymmetric variants: backward mimicry (in which a speaker uses a contour used previously by the interlocutor) and forward influence (in which a speaker's contour appears later in the speech of the interlocutor). This distinction sheds new light on significant correlations with a number of social variables related to the level of engagement of speakers in a corpus of task-oriented dialogues in Standard American English.
Cite as: Gravano, A., Beňuš, Š., Levitan, R., Hirschberg, J. (2015) Backward mimicry and forward influence in prosodic contour choice in standard American English. Proc. Interspeech 2015, 1839-1843, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2015-67
@inproceedings{gravano15_interspeech,
author={Agustín Gravano and Štefan Beňuš and Rivka Levitan and Julia Hirschberg},
title={{Backward mimicry and forward influence in prosodic contour choice in standard American English}},
year=2015,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2015},
pages={1839--1843},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2015-67}
}