Rhythm Perception, Speaking Rate Entrainment, and Conversational Quality: A Mediated Model

Abstract

Purpose: Acoustic–prosodic entrainment, defined as the tendency for individuals to modify their speech behaviors to more closely align with the behaviors of their conversation partner, plays an important role in successful interaction. From a mechanistic perspective, acoustic–prosodic entrainment is, by its very nature, a rhythmic activity. Accordingly, it is highly plausible that an individual's rhythm perception abilities play a role in their ability to successfully entrain. Here, we examine the impact of rhythm perception in speaking rate entrainment and subsequent conversational quality. Method: A round-robin paradigm was used to collect 90 dialogues from neurotypical adults. Additional assessments determined participants' rhythm perception abilities, social competence, and partner familiarity (i.e., whether the conversation partners knew each other prior to the interaction. Mediation analysis was used to examine the relationships between rhythm perception scores, speaking rate entrainment (using a measure of static local synchrony), and a measure of conversational success (i.e., conversational quality) based on third-party listener observations. Findings were compared to the same analysis with three additional predictive factors: participant gender, partner familiarity, and social competence. Results: Results revealed a relationship between rhythm perception and speaking rate entrainment. In unfamiliar conversation partners, there was a relationship between speaking rate entrainment and conversational quality. The relationships between entrainment and each of the three additional factors (i.e., gender, partner familiarity, and social competence) were nonsignificant. Conclusions: In unfamiliar conversation partners, better rhythm perception abilities were indicative of increased conversational quality mediated by higher levels of speaking rate entrainment. These results support theoretical postulations specifying rhythm perception abilities as a component of acoustic–prosodic entrainment, which, in turn, facilitates conversational success. Knowledge of this relationship contributes to the development of a causal framework for considering a mechanism by which rhythm perception deficits in clinical populations may impact conversational success.

Language‐Specific Constraints on Conversation: Evidence from Danish and Norwegian

“…It is very likely that these non‐verbal mechanisms are also at play, for instance, in the form of gestural entrainment or non‐verbal backchannels and repair initiations. Further, there is increasing evidence of the importance of prosodic and acoustic entrainment, its cross‐linguistic and contextual variability and its relations to performance in task‐oriented conversations (Fusaroli & Tylén, 2015; Levitan et al., 2015; Ostrand & Chodroff, 2021; Savino, Lapertosa, Caffò, & Refice, 2016; Wynn, Barrett, Berisha, Liss, & Borrie, 2023). Investigating multimodal aspects of interaction will add crucial knowledge about the complexity behind establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in a conversation (e.g., Trujillo, Dideriksen, Tylén, Christiansen, & Fusaroli, 2023).…”

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

“…Sometimes cross correlation is used (e.g., Abney et al, 2014;Pardo et al, 2010) to compare the speech features at one time point to the values of multiple time points throughout the conversation. Other researchers have employed multi-level modeling to evaluate if one interlocutor's speech features are predictive of the features of their conversational partner on adjacent speaking turns (i.e., if they are moving in tandem with one another; Michalsky et al, 2016;Seidl et al, 2018;Wynn et al, 2022). Yet another approach measures synchrony using the square of correlation coefficients, mutual information, and mean of spectral coherence to determine the dependency of the feature values of conversing interlocutors (e.g., Lee et al, 2010).…”

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.…”