Acoustic and articulatory measures of prosodic convergence in a cooperative maze navigation task

Abstract

Convergence effects have been found in many aspects of communication between speakers in conversation. This study examines how phonetic properties of each speaker’s prosodic structure differ before, during and after participating in a cooperative maze task. Using two NDI electromagnetic articulatory tracking systems simultaneously, we recorded speakers of American English in dyads (one male dyad & one female dyad). Acoustic measurements included: 1) sentence durations, 2) phrase-final lengthening, 3) occurrence frequency of sentence-final boundary tones (percentage H%), and 4) peak F0 values in sentence-final words. Articulatory boundary strength measures for word-final consonant(s) articulations included: 1) movement durations, 2) displacement, and 3) time-to-peak velocity in phrase-medial and phrase-final positions. Speakers exhibited distinct phonetic patterns before the cooperative maze task. However, conversing speakers showed convergence effects in prosodic boundary strength, choice of boundary tone...