The Relationship between Prosodic Ability and Conversational Prosodic Entrainment

Conversational entrainment or alignment-the convergence of conversation partners over the course of a conversation in a variety of linguistic features-is a well-attested conversational phenomenon. The research on prosodic entrainment has shown correlations between prosodic entrainment and several social dimensions of rapport between conversation partners. However, little is known about how skill-level in the entrainment domain affects the ability to converge during a conversation. The goal of the current study was to investigate whether skill-level of a speaker in receptive and expressive word, sentence, and emotional prosody is correlated with the amount of prosodic entrainment contributed at the conversational level. Twenty native speakers of American English were paired into ten dyads of seven female/female and three female/male conversation pairs. Conversations for each pair were recorded and analyzed. Test scores measuring word, sentence, and emotional prosody were correlated with the amount of fundamental frequency entrainment during conversations. The results indicate that a negative correlation exists between expressive prosody skill and the amount of f0 entrainment contributed by a speaker. This suggests that speakers with better expressive prosodic skills at the word and sentence level entrain less to their conversation partners. Receptive prosody ability was not correlated with conversational prosodic entrainment.