Acoustic–phonetic convergence among interacting talkers

Abstract

Among other sources, acoustic–phonetic variability derives from both personal attributes of a talker and the social structure of a conversational setting. This research begins to detail the effects of such sources by examining the influence of conversational interaction on speech production. A set of talkers provided samples of speech before, during, and after participating in a paired conversational task. Using an A×B paradigm with a separate set of listeners, initial research found that paired talkers became more similar in phonetic repertoire, that this convergence persisted over a short delay, and that the degree of convergence was influenced by both the sex and task role of a talker. This paper presents detailed acoustic and talker scaling analyses from this conversational corpus in an attempt to chart the effects of personal and situational factors on speech variability. [Research supported in part by NIMH Grant No. 5F32MH64995.]