Prosodic entrainment in dialog acts

TL;DR

This study investigates how prosodic features like intonation and rhythm are entrained in spoken dialogs, revealing that cooperative and competitive contexts influence entrainment levels based on dialog act properties.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of prosodic entrainment across different dialog acts and game types, highlighting factors affecting entrainment in cooperative versus competitive settings.

Findings

Entrainment varies with game type and dialog act properties.

High-authority, frequent dialog acts show more entrainment in cooperative games.

Active control of entrainment may differ between cooperative and competitive interactions.

Abstract

We examined prosodic entrainment in spoken dialogs separately for several dialog acts in cooperative and competitive games. Entrainment was measured for intonation features derived from a superpositional intonation stylization as well as for rhythm features. The found differences can be related to the cooperative or competitive nature of the game, as well as to dialog act properties as its intrinsic authority, supportiveness and distributional characteristics. In cooperative games dialog acts with a high authority given by knowledge and with a high frequency showed the most entrainment. The results are discussed amongst others with respect to the degree of active entrainment control in cooperative behavior.