Acoustic-prosodic entrainment in Slovak, Spanish, English and Chinese: A cross-linguistic comparison

Abstract

It is well established that speakers of Standard American English entrain, or become more similar to each other as they speak, in acoustic-prosodic features of their speech as well as other behaviors. Entrainment in other languages is less well understood. This work uses a variety of metrics to measure acoustic-prosodic entrainment in four comparable corpora of task-oriented conversational speech in Slovak, Spanish, English and Chinese. We report the results of these experiments and describe trends and patterns that can be observed from comparing acoustic-prosodic entrainment in these four languages. We find evidence of a variety of forms of entrainment across all the languages studied, with some evidence of individual differences as well within the languages.