A Dyadic Perspective on Speech Accommodation and Social Connection: Both Partners' Rejection Sensitivity Matters

Individual Differences in Accent Imitation

All talkers show some flexibility in their speech, and the ability to imitate an unfamiliar accent is a skill that shows vast individual differences. Yet the source of these individual differences, in particular whether they originate from perceptual, motor, or social/personality factors, is not yet clear. In the current study, we ask how individual differences in these factors predict individual differences in deliberate accent imitation. Participants imitated three accents, and attempts were rated for accuracy. A set of measures tracking individual differences in perceptual, motor, cognitive, personality, and demographic factors were also acquired. Imitation ability was related to differences in musical perception, vocal articulation, and the personality characteristic of "openness to experience," and was affected by attitudes towards the imitated talkers. Taken together, results suggest that deliberate accent imitation skill is modulated not only by core perceptual and motor skills, but also by personality and affinity to the talker, suggesting that some aspects of deliberate imitation are a function of domain-general constraints on perceptual-motor systems, while others may be modulated by social context.

Speech Entrainment in Adolescent Conversations: A Developmental Perspective

PURPOSE

Defined as the similarity of speech behaviors between interlocutors, speech entrainment plays an important role in successful adult conversations. According to theoretical models of entrainment and research on motoric, cognitive, and social developmental milestones, the ability to entrain should develop throughout adolescence. However, little is known about the specific developmental trajectory or the role of speech entrainment in conversational outcomes of this age group. The purpose of this study is to characterize speech entrainment patterns in the conversations of neurotypical early adolescents.

METHOD

This study utilized a corpus of 96 task-based conversations between adolescents between the ages of 9 and 14 years and a comparison corpus of 32 task-based conversations between adults. For each conversational turn, two speech entrainment scores were calculated for 429 acoustic features across rhythmic, articulatory, and phonatory dimensions. Predictive modeling was used to evaluate the degree of entrainment and relationship between entrainment and two metrics of conversational success.

RESULTS

Speech entrainment increased throughout early adolescence but did not reach the level exhibited in conversations between adults. Additionally, speech entrainment was predictive of both conversational quality and conversational efficiency. Furthermore, models that included all acoustic features and both entrainment types performed better than models that only included individual acoustic feature sets or one type of entrainment.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings show that speech entrainment skills are largely developed during early adolescence with continued development possibly occurring across later adolescence. Additionally, results highlight the role of speech entrainment in successful conversation in this population, suggesting the import of continued exploration of this phenomenon in both neurotypical and neurodivergent adolescents. We also provide evidence of the value of using holistic measures that capture the multidimensionality of speech entrainment and provide a validated methodology for investigating entrainment across multiple acoustic features and entrainment types.

Classifying Conversational Entrainment of Speech Behavior: An Expanded Framework and Review

Conversational entrainment, also known as alignment, accommodation, convergence, and coordination, is broadly defined as similarity of communicative behavior between interlocutors. Within current literature, specific terminology, definitions, and measurement approaches are wide-ranging and highly variable. As new ways of measuring and quantifying entrainment are developed and research in this area continues to expand, consistent terminology and a means of organizing entrainment research is critical, affording cohesion and assimilation of knowledge. While systems for categorizing entrainment do exist, these efforts are not entirely comprehensive in that specific measurement approaches often used within entrainment literature cannot be categorized under existing frameworks. The purpose of this review article is twofold: First, we propose an expanded version of an earlier framework which allows for the categorization of all measures of entrainment of speech behaviors and includes refinements, additions, and explanations aimed at improving its clarity and accessibility. Second, we present an extensive literature review, demonstrating how current literature fits into the given framework. We conclude with a discussion of how the proposed entrainment framework presented herein can be used to unify efforts in entrainment research.

Rhythm Perception, Speaking Rate Entrainment, and Conversational Quality: A Mediated Model

PURPOSE

Acoustic-prosodic entrainment, defined as the tendency for individuals to modify their speech behaviors to more closely align with the behaviors of their conversation partner, plays an important role in successful interaction. From a mechanistic perspective, acoustic-prosodic entrainment is, by its very nature, a rhythmic activity. Accordingly, it is highly plausible that an individual's rhythm perception abilities play a role in their ability to successfully entrain. Here, we examine the impact of rhythm perception in speaking rate entrainment and subsequent conversational quality.

METHOD

A round-robin paradigm was used to collect 90 dialogues from neurotypical adults. Additional assessments determined participants' rhythm perception abilities, social competence, and partner familiarity (i.e., whether the conversation partners knew each other prior to the interaction. Mediation analysis was used to examine the relationships between rhythm perception scores, speaking rate entrainment (using a measure of static local synchrony), and a measure of conversational success (i.e., conversational quality) based on third-party listener observations. Findings were compared to the same analysis with three additional predictive factors: participant gender, partner familiarity, and social competence.

RESULTS

Results revealed a relationship between rhythm perception and speaking rate entrainment. In unfamiliar conversation partners, there was a relationship between speaking rate entrainment and conversational quality. The relationships between entrainment and each of the three additional factors (i.e., gender, partner familiarity, and social competence) were nonsignificant.

CONCLUSIONS

In unfamiliar conversation partners, better rhythm perception abilities were indicative of increased conversational quality mediated by higher levels of speaking rate entrainment. These results support theoretical postulations specifying rhythm perception abilities as a component of acoustic-prosodic entrainment, which, in turn, facilitates conversational success. Knowledge of this relationship contributes to the development of a causal framework for considering a mechanism by which rhythm perception deficits in clinical populations may impact conversational success.

The Reliability of Individual Differences in VOT Imitation

Recent work has shown that individuals vary in phonetic behaviors in ways that deviate from group norms and are not attributable to sociolinguistically relevant dimensions such as gender or social class. However, it is unknown whether these individual differences observed in the lab are stable characteristics of individuals or whether they simply reflect noise or sporadic fluctuations. This study investigates the individual-level stability in imitation of a model talker's artificially-lengthened VOT. We use a test-retest design in which the same set of participants perform the same lexical shadowing task on two separate occasions and find that degree of convergence or divergence is highly correlated on an individual basis across visits. Further, we find a strong correlation between individual VOT shifts toward a male model talker and shifts toward a female model talker. Findings contribute to a growing body of literature suggesting that averaging over groups of participants masks the complexity of phonetic behaviors, such as imitation, and suggest that individual differences in phonetic behavior are an area of promising future study.

Speaking to a common tune: Between-speaker convergence in voice fundamental frequency in a joint speech production task

Recent research on speech communication has revealed a tendency for speakers to imitate at least some of the characteristics of their interlocutor’s speech sound shape. This phenomenon, referred to as phonetic convergence, entails a moment-to-moment adaptation of the speaker’s speech targets to the perceived interlocutor’s speech. It is thought to contribute to setting up a conversational common ground between speakers and to facilitate mutual understanding. However, it remains uncertain to what extent phonetic convergence occurs in voice fundamental frequency (F₀), in spite of the major role played by pitch, F₀’s perceptual correlate, as a conveyor of both linguistic information and communicative cues associated with the speaker’s social/individual identity and emotional state. In the present work, we investigated to what extent two speakers converge towards each other with respect to variations in F₀ in a scripted dialogue. Pairs of speakers jointly performed a speech production task, in which they were asked to alternately read aloud a written story divided into a sequence of short reading turns. We devised an experimental set-up that allowed us to manipulate the speakers’ F₀ in real time across turns. We found that speakers tended to imitate each other’s changes in F₀ across turns that were both limited in amplitude and spread over large temporal intervals. This shows that, at the perceptual level, speakers monitor slow-varying movements in their partner’s F₀ with high accuracy and, at the production level, that speakers exert a very fine-tuned control on their laryngeal vibrator in order to imitate these F₀ variations. Remarkably, F₀ convergence across turns was found to occur in spite of the large melodic variations typically associated with reading turns. Our study sheds new light on speakers’ perceptual tracking of F₀ in speech processing, and the impact of this perceptual tracking on speech production.

Vocal alignment to native and non-native speakers of English

Research on vocal alignment, the tendency for language users to match another individual's speech productions, suggests that multiple factors contribute to this behavior. Social and motivational goals, aspects of cognitive architecture, and linguistic flexibility may all affect the extent to which vocal alignment occurs, suggesting complex underlying mechanisms. The present study capitalized on the social and linguistic characteristics of Spanish-accented English to examine the relationship among these contributors to vocal alignment. American English-speaking adults participated in a shadowing task. Degree of vocal alignment was assessed by both acoustic measures and independent raters' judgments. Participants aligned to both native English and Spanish-accented productions, despite differences in attitudes to and intelligibility of the different accents. Individual differences in shadowers' vowel dispersion were also related to extent of vocal alignment, with greater dispersion associated with greater alignment. Acoustic measures were related to perceptual assessments of alignment and differed by accent type, suggesting that patterns of alignment may differ across accents. Overall, the current study demonstrates vocal alignment between talkers of differing language backgrounds and highlights the importance of acoustic and linguistic components of alignment behavior.