Gender and prosodic entrainment in Mandarin conversations

Abstract

This study aims to find out how gender affects prosodic entrainment in Mandarin conversation. Based on the analyses of Tongji Games Corpus, it is found that in Mandarin conversations, mixed the gender groups entrain on the greatest number of features and males entrain on the least; A cross-linguistic comparison between Mandarin Chinese and English finds striking similarities over the number of prosodic features and the degree of prosodic entrainment. The similarities support not only the view that entrainment is a cross-cultural phenomenon, but provides evidence that gender plays the similar role in prosodic entrainment in different language groups.