2007/05/16

Pardo, J. S. (2006). On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction. Journal of the Acoustical society of America, 119(4), 2382–2393.

Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Elisa

This paper aims to examine whether there was a phonetic convergence between interacting talkers during conversational interaction. Six male and six female undergraduate students were paired for the talker conversation. Subjects of the same gender that had proximal F0 were paired together. They were asked to do three tasks, including a pre-task, a map task, and a post-task. In the pre-task and post-task, the talkers were instructed to ask the receivers three questions based on the landmark labels on the map: (1) “Number ___ is the ___.”; (2) “Say ___ again”.; (3) “Number ___ is the ___”. Two weeks after the pre-task, the participants returned to do the map task. Each talker in a pair was assigned a role- one talker acted as the instruction giver, and the other was the instruction receiver. The instructor had a complete map while the receiver’s map was not complete. They were encouraged to converse in order to complete the map as quickly as possible. Right after the map task, the participants were involved in the post-task. Items that repeated between talkers in a short time, appeared at the clause-final position with a complete pause or breath, and appeared on both of the giver and receiver maps were analyzed. 30 listeners who were native speakers of American English were recruited from an introductory psychology course and they were paired into 6 groups. They were asked to judge whether the items were more like those in the pre-task or those in the post-task. Results showed that phonetic convergence occurred during the map task when convergence was carried to the post-task. Besides, there was greater convergence when a receiver provided the sample utterance and a giver repeated. Male pairs converged more than female.