Acoustic-prosodic Entrainment and Social Behavior

In conversation, speakers have been shown to entrain, or become more similar to each other, in various ways. We measure entrainment on eight acoustic features extracted from the speech of subjects playing a cooperative computer game and associate the degree of entrainment with a number of manually-labeled social variables acquired using Amazon Mechanical Turk, as well as objective measures of dialogue success. We find that male-female pairs entrain on all features, while male-male pairs entrain only on particular acoustic features (intensity mean, intensity maximum and syllables per second). We further determine that entrainment is more important to the perception of female-male social behavior than it is for same-gender pairs, and it is more important to the smoothness and flow of male-male dialogue than it is for female-female or mixed-gender pairs. Finally, we find that entrainment is more pronounced when intensity or speaking rate is especially high or low.