Investigating fine temporal dynamics of prosodic and lexical accommodation

Abstract

Conversational interaction is a dynamic activity in which participants engage in the construction of meaning and in establishing and maintaining social relationships. Lexical and prosodic accommodation have been observed in many studies as contributing importantly to these dimensions of social interaction. However, while previous works have considered accommodation mechanisms at global levels (for whole conversations, halves and thirds of conversations), this work investigates their evolution through repeated analysis at time intervals of increasing granularity to analyze the dynamics of alignment in a spoken language corpus. Results show that the levels of both prosodic and lexical accommodation fluctuate several times over the course of a conversation.

Phonetic Accommodation During Conversational Interactions: An Overview

“…Accommodation between interlocutors has been studied concerning several linguistic features, including phonetic characteristics (detailed in this paper), segmental duration (e.g., Edlund et al, 2009;Lee et al, 2018;Pardo et al, 2013), linguistic style (e.g., Manson et al, 2013;Thomson et al, 2001), syntactic complexity (Xu & Reitter, 2016), and lexical choices (e.g., Reverdy et al, 2020;Ward & Litman, 2007). Thorough reviews may be found in Barón-Birchenall (2018), Bonin et al (2013), Delaherche et al (2012), De Looze et al (2014, Louwerse et al (2012), andPardo (2006).…”

“…Regarding social functions, overall linguistic convergence between speakers contributes to communication success by facilitating sense-making, common goal attainment, and exchange of information, as well as preventing misunderstandings and establishing rapport and intimacy (Bonin et al, 2013;Borrie et al, 2015;De Looze et al, 2014;Reitter & Moore, 2007). In addition, converging during conversations may help interlocutors to define their identity by categorizing others and themselves into groups, and to establish a mutual comprehension by decreasing social distance (Lelong & Bailly, 2011).…”

Classifying conversational entrainment of speech behavior: An expanded framework and review

“…However, as these analyses did not investigate how entrainment changed across the course of the conversation, it would not be considered a dynamic model. Finally, while the majority of literature examines the concept of dynamicity on a linear timescale, a few studies have utilized nonlinear methods (e.g., Bonin et al, 2013;Vaughan, 2011). That is, entrainment may not steadily increase across an entire conversation, but rather may increase within some portions and decrease within others, depending on a variety of factors.…”

Filtering conversations through dialogue acts labels for improving corpus-based convergence studies

“…Convergence is presented in general and influential models of communication such as accommodation theory (Giles et al, 1991) or interactive alignment (Pickering and Garrod, 2004). This variation due to the other party has been studied for many levels of speech and language, for example in phonology (Street, 1984;Pardo, 2006) or in prosody (Levitan and Hirschberg, 2011;Truong and Heylen, 2012;Bonin et al, 2013).…”