Entrainment profiles: Comparison by gender, role, and feature set

TL;DR

This study investigates how prosodic features like pitch and rhythm are entrained in cooperative dialogues, revealing gender and role influences on entrainment patterns and their impact on task success.

Contribution

It introduces new feature sets for analyzing prosodic entrainment and compares their patterns across gender and role in cooperative interactions.

Findings

Different feature sets show distinct entrainment patterns.

Female describers entrain more than male describers.

Male describers' strategy may slightly improve task success.

Abstract

We examine prosodic entrainment in cooperative game dialogs for new feature sets describing register, pitch accent shape, and rhythmic aspects of utterances. For these as well as for established features we present entrainment profiles to detect within- and across-dialog entrainment by the speakers' gender and role in the game. It turned out, that feature sets undergo entrainment in different quantitative and qualitative ways, which can partly be attributed to their different functions. Furthermore, interactions between speaker gender and role (describer vs. follower) suggest gender-dependent strategies in cooperative solution-oriented interactions: female describers entrain most, male describers least. Our data suggests a slight advantage of the latter strategy on task success.