ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016

Prosodic Convergence with Spoken Stimuli in Laboratory Data

Margaret Zellers

Accommodation or convergence between speakers has been shown to occur on a variety of levels of linguistic structure. Phonetic convergence appears to be a very variable phenomenon in conversation, with social roles strongly influencing who accommodates to whom. Since phonetic convergence appears to be strongly under speaker control, it is unclear whether speakers might converge phonetically in a laboratory setting. The current study investigates accommodation of pitch and duration features in data collected in a laboratory setting. While speakers in the study did not converge to spoken stimuli in terms of duration features, they did converge to an extent on pitch features. However, only some information-structure contexts led to convergence, suggesting that even in a laboratory setting, speakers are aware of the discourse implications of their production.