Disordered speech disrupts conversational entrainment: a study of acoustic-prosodic entrainment and communicative success in populations with communication challenges

Abstract

Conversational entrainment, a pervasive communication phenomenon in which dialogue partners adapt their behaviors to align more closely with one another, is considered essential for successful spoken interaction. While well-established in other disciplines, this phenomenon has received limited attention in the field of speech pathology and the study of communication breakdowns in clinical populations. The current study examined acoustic-prosodic entrainment, as well as a measure of communicative success, in three distinctly different dialogue groups: (i) healthy native vs. healthy native speakers (Control), (ii) healthy native vs. foreign-accented speakers (Accented), and (iii) healthy native vs. dysarthric speakers (Disordered). Dialogue group comparisons revealed significant differences in how the groups entrain on particular acoustic–prosodic features, including pitch, intensity, and jitter. Most notably, the Disordered dialogues were characterized by significantly less acoustic-prosodic entrainment than the Control dialogues. Further, a positive relationship between entrainment indices and communicative success was identified. These results suggest that the study of conversational entrainment in speech pathology will have essential implications for both scientific theory and clinical application in this domain.

Entrainment in Multi-Party Spoken Dialogues at Multiple Linguistic Levels

“…All features except HighTF-game show proximity (have positive T-statistic) which means the partners are more similar to each other than to non-partners. At the prosodic level, only pitch-mean and pitch-max do not show significant proximity 7 . These results indicate that proximity occurs at both acoustic-prosodic and lexical levels.…”

“…Though several studies have measured acoustic-prosodic entrainment [14,8,7,21] and lexical entrainment [15,17,4,22], much of this work has focused on dyadic conversations. Some research has attempted to show that entrainment co-occurs at multiple linguistic levels, with varying success [5,23].…”

“…Consistent with prior work on dyad entrainment [8,21,7], we extract features of pitch, intensity, jitter, and shimmer using Praat software [28]. Pitch describes the frequency of sound waves, intensity describes the loudness or energy transported by the wave, and jitter and shimmer (acoustic characteristics of voice quality) measure frequency and energy variation, respectively.…”

“…Linguistic entrainment 1 , the phenomena whereby dialogue partners speak more similarly to each other [1,2], is an important characteristic of human conversation. Entrainment is important for the naturalness of speech [3] and associated with a variety of conversational qualities, like dialogue and task success [4,5,6,7]. According to the psycholinguistics literature, entrainment is believed to occur at multiple linguistic levels, such as acoustic-prosodic, lexical, and syntactic [8,4,9,10].…”

Do Conversational Partners Entrain on Articulatory Precision?

“…spectral features) [4]- [6]. Alignment on these features has been found to be related to higher rapport, trust, efficiency, and agreement [7]- [10]. However, there is a critical aspect of spoken dialogue on which entrainment has not been studied, and which has important implications for human-human and human-computer interactions.…”