Speech Prosody 2014

Prosodic Entrainment in Mandarin Chinese and English: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison

Zhihua Xia, Rivka Levitan and Julia Hirschberg
Entrainment is the propensity of speakers to begin behaving like one another in conversation. We identify evidence of entrainment in a number of acoustic and prosodic dimensions in conversational speech of American English speakers and Mandarin Chinese speakers. We compare entrainment in the Columbia Games corpus and the Tongji Games Corpus and find some remarkable similarities between the two.