Quantification of prosodic entrainment in affective spontaneous spoken interactions of married couples

Abstract

Interaction synchrony among interlocutors happens naturally as people adapt their speaking style gradually to promote efficient communication. In this work, we quantify one aspect of interaction synchrony prosodic entrainment, specifically pitch and energy, in married couples’ problem-solving interactions using speech signal-derived measures. Statistical testings demonstrate that some of these measures capture useful information; they show higher values in interactions with couples having high positive attitude compared to high negative attitude. Further, by using quantized entrainment measures employed with statistical symbol sequence matching in a maximum likelihood framework, we obtained 76% accuracy in predicting positive affect vs. negative affect.