Prosodic Entrainment Across Cultures

Fillmore Professor: Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University

Date: 7/6/2017

2017 Linguistic Institute Public Lecture

In conversation, speakers often adapt aspects of their speaking style to the style of their conversational partner.  This phenomenon goes by many names, including entrainment, adaptation, and alignment.  In this talk, I will describe results from experiments on English and Mandarin prosodic entrainment in the Columbia Games Corpus and in the Tongji Games Corpus, large corpora of speech recorded from subjects playing a series of computer games. I also will discuss experiments relating entrainment to several social dimensions, including likeability and dominance, and its relationship to higher level prosodic features.  Finally, I will describe experiment with systems that entrain to their users in a set of “Go-Fish” games created in English, Porteño Spanish, and Slovak, as well as other ongoing research studying entrainment in deceptive speech and in linguistic code-switching. This is joint work with Štefan Beňuš, Nishmar Cestero, Agustín Gravano,  Rivka Levitan, Sarah Ita Levitan, and  Zhihua Xia.

The 2017 Linguistic Institute at the University of Kentucky Lexington featured seven public lectures by leading linguists in a variety of fields. The videos of the lectures, courtesy of the Institute's techincal team and organizers, are available on the original Institute website and have been generously shared with the LSA.