Entrainment profiles: Comparison by gender, role, and feature set
This work addresses how prosodic entrainment varies by gender and role in cooperative interactions, with incremental insights into communication strategies.
The study examined prosodic entrainment in cooperative game dialogs using new and established feature sets, finding that feature sets entrain differently based on function, with gender and role interactions showing female describers entrain most and male describers least, and a slight advantage for the male strategy in task success.
We examine prosodic entrainment in cooperative game dialogs for new feature sets describing register, pitch accent shape, and rhythmic aspects of utterances. For these as well as for established features we present entrainment profiles to detect within- and across-dialog entrainment by the speakers' gender and role in the game. It turned out, that feature sets undergo entrainment in different quantitative and qualitative ways, which can partly be attributed to their different functions. Furthermore, interactions between speaker gender and role (describer vs. follower) suggest gender-dependent strategies in cooperative solution-oriented interactions: female describers entrain most, male describers least. Our data suggests a slight advantage of the latter strategy on task success.