ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Local and global convergence in the temporal domain in Polish task-oriented dialogue

Maciej Karpinski, Katarzyna Klessa, Agnieszka Czoska

Conversational parties tend to mutually adapt their communicative behaviour in a number of dimensions, from the level of physical aspects of speech signal and gesture, utterance properties, up to the level of mental representations. In the present study, an attempt is made to track the process of convergence in the temporal domain both as a global tendency and a local phenomenon. The material under study con- sists of two sets of task-oriented dialogues recorded with or without eye contact (telephone conversations) between the speakers. All the recordings were segmented into syllables and analysed in terms of speech rate and nPVI for each speaker as well as for the correlations between the speakers in each pair. Global convergence tendencies were proven to be weak but some influence of dialogue settings and gender was found. The results seem to support the hypotheses that the alignment-related processes remain under the influence of many factors related to the dialogue flow and cannot be modelled as simply incremental.