Laughter entrainment in dyadic interactions: Temporal distribution and form

Abstract

It has been established across a wide range of communicative behaviours that conversational partners tend to become more similar during their interaction. This phenomenon, often called entrainment, has been shown to take place not only at various linguistic levels, but also across different modalities. We investigated in this study whether entrainment can be found in the use of paralinguistic phenomena in conversation. Laughter is a vocalization widely recognized across cultures, and one of the most encountered paralinguistic events in spontaneous interactions. Using conversational data from three distinct languages: French, German and Mandarin Chinese, we examined two facets of entrainment: temporal and form-related. Five entrainment measures, computed across two different levels of linguistic organization, were considered in our analysis. Support was found for temporal entrainment at the laughter-token level, in how speakers of a dialogue distribute their laughter events throughout the conversation. At the turn level, speakers of all three languages showed evidence for entrainment, by aligning their laughter more with the beginning and the end of their turns. Moreover, this phenomenon seemed to be enhanced in the second half of the examined recordings, compared to the first half. The study found support also for form-related entrainment, with conversational partners employing more similar intensity levels for consecutive, than for non-consecutive laughter. Furthermore, we show that the entrainment aspects captured by our measures are independent of the degree of familiarity between the speakers.