Conversational quality is affected by and reflected in prosodic entrainment

Abstract

Prosodic entrainment is connected to various forms of communicative success. One possibility to assess successful communication in non-task-oriented everyday conversations is through the participants' perception of conversational quality. In this study we investigate whether a speaker's degree of prosodic entrainment reflects the perceived conversational quality in dating conversations. Furthermore, we ask whether prosodic entrainment can influence the perceived conversational quality in return. Based on 98 spontaneous mixed-sex dating conversations we find that conversational quality has a significant effect on a speaker's degree of pitch level entrainment. Furthermore, pitch entrainment also has a significant effect on how one's interlocutor perceives the conversational quality. However, we find differences between the two effects which suggests that what a speaker does in reaction to increased perceived conversational quality is not necessarily what an interlocutor perceives as increased conversational quality. Accordingly, while we find a bidirectional influence of prosodic entrainment and perceived conversational quality, this connection is not reciprocal in nature.

Prosodic Entrainment in Conversations of Verbal Children and Teens on the Autism Spectrum

“…Given the positive correlation between f0 entrainment and the success of conversations as well as personal and interpersonal attributes of the conversation partners ( Lubold et al, 2016 ; Michalsky and Schoormann, 2017 ; Michalsky et al, 2018 ; Niebuhr and Michalsky, 2019 ), the finding that children and teens with ASD show less mean f0 entrainment compared to their neurotypical peers is significant. Especially, seen that earlier studies on lexical and speech rate entrainment did not find differences between participants with and without ASD ( Nadig et al, 2015 ; Branigan et al, 2016 ; Hopkins et al, 2017 ; Wynn et al, 2018 ).…”

“…Similar to other linguistic accommodation behaviors, prosodic entrainment has been shown to correlate with a variety of positive attributes regarding the conversation itself as well as the participating speakers. Prosodic entrainment, especially f0 entrainment, has shown to correlate with the perceived quality of a conversation ( Michalsky et al, 2018 ), the rapport between conversation partners ( Lubold and Pon-Barry, 2014 ), perceived attractiveness and likability ( Michalsky and Schoormann, 2017 ), as well as the ability to engage successfully in teamwork ( Niebuhr and Michalsky, 2019 ).…”

PASCAL and DPA: A Pilot Study on Using Prosodic Competence Scores to Predict Communicative Skills for Team Working and Public Speaking

“…Alternatively, since the team work was self-assessed, it is possible that students in the overall higher scoring DPA teams merely perceived their team work to be better. Since high degrees of entrainment correlate with social closeness, which is also related to conversational quality [30,31], mutual liking and encouragement [32], and generally positive impressions, members of teams showing relatively high degrees of entrainment may simply have perceived interactions inside their teams as more fulfilling and pleasant, hence evaluating their time management and team working as much more positive than the members of overall lower scoring DPA teams. This is also supported by anecdotal evidence from the principal course lecturer: Although the overall higher scoring DPA teams started to interact faster and livelier, he observed the conversations to frequently stray away from the weather station project, while the overall lower scoring DPA teams talked less but stayed more focused on the task at hand.…”

Prosodic and lexical entrainment in adults with and without schizophrenia

“…Entrainment has often been associated with positive social measures such as feelings of closeness and interpersonal rapport (e.g. [15,16,17]). On the contrary, schizophrenia is associated with social difficulties.…”