Temporal entrainment as a mechanism for conversational turn-taking in dyadic and triadic interactions
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2021-06-01
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
Turn-taking is a procedure in human communication that requires an enormous amount of temporal
precision. Previous research has proposed that this exact timing is due to the entrainment of neural
oscillators that facilitate speech rhythm tracking. Via this rhythmic synchronisation listeners can predict
upcoming transition relevance places and anticipate on taking the turn. This research has tested two
implications of this proposed model of entrainment. The rst implication states that the rhythmic
entrainment causes a correlation between the speech rates of the participants involved in a conversation.
The second implication entails that, since the entrainment is counterphased, there will be a counterphased
alignment of the rhythmic units of the two parties involved in a turn-taking event. Both hypotheses were
examined on the stress level, represented by beats, and the syllable level. Analyses were performed on
a corpus of dyadic and triadic English conversations. A beat tracking algorithm, originally designed for
tracking temporal regularities in music, was applied to extract a sequence of beats from the audio signal.
Beat rate is expressed as the average duration between subsequent beats; the mean inter-beat interval
(IBI). Syllable rate is expressed in a similar fashion. Repeated measures correlation coe cients showed
a negative correlation between the beat rates of two speakers in both experimental setups, though the
strength of the e ect was larger in dyads than in triads. A systematic relation between beat locations
in overlapping turns was found, though this relation did not display counterphased alignment. Some
form of entrainment of beat rates between the two parties in a turn-event seems present, though this
entrainment does not follow the hypothesised system. No signi cant correlation between syllable rates
in dyads and triads was found. All experimental conditions of the syllables rates showed no systematic
pattern of rhythmic alignment. These results show no evidence for syllables as the rhythmic unit of
entrainment.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen