Prosodic and Social Dimensions of Entrainment in Dialogue by (Columbia University)
When people speak together, they often adapt aspects of their speaking style based upon the style of their conversational partner. This phenomena goes by many names, including adaptation, alignment, and entrainment, inter alia. In this talk, I will describe experiments in English and Mandarin prosodic entrainment in the Columbia Games Corpus and in the Tongji Games Corpus, large corpora of speech recorded from subjects playing a series of computer games. I will discuss how prosodic entrainment is related to turn-taking behaviors and to several measures of task and dialogue success. I will also discuss experiments relating entrainment to several social dimensions, including likeability and dominance. This is joint work with Stefan Benus, Agustín Gravano, Ani Nenkova, Rivka Levitan, Laura Willson, and Zhihua Xia.
