Linguistic entrainment, the phenomena whereby dialogue partners speak more similarly to each other in a variety of dimensions, is key to the success and naturalness of interactions. While there is considerable evidence for both lexical and acoustic-prosodic entrainment, little work has been conducted to investigate the relationship between these two different modalities using the same measures in the same dialogues, specifically in multi-party dialogue. In this paper, we measure lexical and acoustic-prosodic entrainment for multi-party teams to explore whether entrainment occurs at multiple levels during conversation and to understand the relationship between these two modalities.

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Research on human spoken language has shown that speech plays an important role in identifying speaker personality traits. In this work, we propose an approach for identifying speaker personality traits using overlap dynamics in multiparty spoken dialogues. We first define a set of novel features representing the overlap dynamics of each speaker. We then investigate the impact of speaker personality traits on these features using ANOVA tests. We find that features of overlap dynamics significantly vary for speakers with different levels of both Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Finally, we find that classifiers using only overlap dynamics features outperform random guessing in identifying Extraversion and Agreeableness, and that the improvements are statistically significant.

Multi-party linguistic entrainment refers to the phenomenon that speakers tend to speak more similarly during conversation. We first developed new measures of multi-party entrainment on features describing linguistic style, and then examined the relationship between entrainment and team characteristics in terms of gender composition, team size, and diversity. Next, we predicted the perception of team social outcomes using multi-party linguistic entrainment and team characteristics with a hierarchical regression model. We found that teams with greater gender diversity had higher minimum convergence than teams with less gender diversity. Entrainment contributed significantly to predicting perceived team social outcomes both alone and controlling for team characteristics.

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