Classifying Conversational Entrainment of Speech Behavior: An Expanded Framework and Review

Abstract

Conversational entrainment, also known as alignment, accommodation, convergence, and coordination is broadly defined as similarity of communicative behavior between interlocutors. Within current literature, specific terminology, definitions, and measurement approaches are wide ranging and highly variable. As new ways of measuring and quantifying entrainment are developed and research in this area continues to expand to fields such as speech-language pathology, consistent terminology and a means of organizing entrainment research is critical, affording cohesion and assimilation of knowledge. While systems for categorizing entrainment do exist, these efforts are not entirely comprehensive in that specific measurement approaches often used within entrainment literature cannot be categorized under existing frameworks. The purpose of this review article is twofold: First, we propose a modified version of the framework presented by Levitan and colleagues (2011; 2014), which allows for the categorization of all measures of acoustic-prosodic entrainment and includes refinements, additions, and explanations aimed at improving its clarity and accessibility. Second, we present an extensive literature review, demonstrating how current literature fits into the given framework. We begin by introducing, describing, and illustrating the updated classification framework, consisting of eight entrainment types categorized by three dichotomous classification factors. To assist with explanations of each entrainment subtype, we draw upon rich literature of acoustic-prosodic behaviors in embodied face-to-face conversations and provide clear examples of each classification type. We conclude with a discussion of how the proposed entrainment framework presented herein can be used to guide unified research efforts in speech-language pathology.

Collective Attention and Collective Intelligence: The Role of Hierarchy and Team Gender Composition

“…Synchrony can be seen as a special case of the broader concept of entrainment (Bernieri et al, 1988;Levitan & Hirschberg, 2011;Wynn & Borrie, 2020), a phenomenon in which two or more objects or actors simultaneously adjust their behavior so as to match the others.' Communications researchers studying entrainment focus both on how similar speech characteristics are (i.e.…”

Individual Interaction Styles: Evidence from a Spoken Chat Corpus

“…Digressing slightly, as entrainment in general takes time (Wynn and Borrie, 2020), one might expect that fragments taken from later into the calls would be closer to the participants' "true" styles, as they come to discover, reveal, relax into, and compromise towards their preferred styles. I therefore hypothesized that the styles of later fragments would be more predictable, but this turned out not to be the case.…”

Prosodic entrainment in individuals with autism spectrum disorder

“…Various attempts have been made to provide frameworks for the classification of different types of entrainment, such as the framework proposed by Wynn and Borrie (2020). The fact that such frameworks exist indicates that the lack of standardized methodology and analysis is not specific to research investigating entrainment in ASD, but is characteristic of acoustic-prosodic entrainment research more generally (see e.g.…”