Conversational Coordination of Articulation Responds to Context: A Clinical Test Case With Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Purpose Coordination of communicative behavior supports shared understanding in conversation. The current study brings together analysis of two speech coordination strategies, entrainment and compensation of articulation, in a preliminary investigation into whether strategy organization is shaped by a challenging communicative context—conversing with a person who has a communication disorder. Method As an initial clinical test case, an automated measure of articulatory precision was analyzed in a corpus of spoken dialogue, where a confederate conversed with participants with traumatic brain injury ( n = 28) and participants with no brain injury ( n = 48). Results Overall, the confederate engaged in significant entrainment and high compensation (hyperarticulation) in conversations with participants with traumatic brain injury relative to significant entrainment and low compensation (hypoarticulation) in conversations with participants with no brain injury. Furthermore, the confederate's articulatory precision changed over the course of the conversations. Conclusions Findings suggest that the organization of conversational coordination is sensitive to context, supporting synergistic models of spoken dialogue. While corpus limitations are acknowledged, these initial results point to differences in the way in which speech strategies are realized in challenging communicative contexts, highlighting a viable and important target for investigation with clinical populations. A framework for investigating speech coordination strategies in tandem and ideas for advancing this line of inquiry serve as key contributions of this work.

Classifying conversational entrainment of speech behavior: An expanded framework and review

“…For instance, investigation of different entrainment types may explain diverging outcomes between studies of the same population. For instance, while Gordon and colleagues (2015) found entrainment disruptions in the conversations of individuals with a TBI, Borrie et al, (2020b) found no significant difference between the entrainment patterns of neurotypical participants and participants with TBI. Although there are a number of factors that may lead to contrasting findings (i.e., different aspects of speech being measured), it is possible that differences in entrainment types being studied (i.e., dynamic global proximity vs. static local synchrony) may contribute to these discrepancies.…”

“…For example, De Looze and colleagues (2014) examined dynamic synchrony by using t-tests to compare the correlation coefficients between interlocutors' speech feature values in the first and the second half of the conversation. Other studies include time as a variable, examining its relationship with entrainment using correlations (e.g., Levitan et al, 2015;Xia et al, 2014) or statistical interactions (e.g., Schweitzer & Lewandowski, 2013;Lewandowski & Jilka, 2019;Borrie et al, 2020b). For instance, Weise and colleagues (2019) examined dynamic proximity by analyzing the correlation between proximity scores (i.e., absolute difference between two interlocutors' feature values) and time (i.e., number of turn exchanges), to determine if the degree of entrainment was predicted by the amount of time in the conversation that had transpired.…”

“…One potential reason that this may be the case is that the organizational structure of this framework is not entirely comprehensive in that specific measurement approaches currently used in entrainment literature cannot be categorized. That is, there are existing measures that do not fit within any of the existing categories as they are presently defined(e.g., Abel & Babel, 2017;Borrie et al, 2020b;Schweitzer & Lewandowski, 2013). Additionally, definitions are, at times, ambiguous and difficult to navigate (i.e., definitions are often brief, not operational, and/or lack necessary distinctions, explanations, and examples).…”

Lexical Alignment is Pervasive Across Contexts in Non‐WEIRD Adult–Child Interactions

“…During conversation, speakers naturally adapt their verbal and non-verbal behaviors to become more similar to their conversational partners. These adaptations have been observed in many behaviors including speaking rate (e.g., Wynn, Barrett, & Borrie, 2022), articulatory precision (e.g., Borrie et al, 2020), word choice (e.g., Stabile & Eigsti, 2022), syntactic structure (e.g., , and body gesture (e.g., Rasenberg, Özyürek, Bögels, & Dingemanse, 2022). This paper specifically explores lexical alignment, where conversational partners adapt their language and reuse one another's words.…”