Individual differences in acoustic-prosodic entrainment in spoken dialogue.

The tendency of conversation partners to adjust to each other to become similar, known as entrainment, has been studied for many years. Several studies have linked differences in this behavior to gender, but with inconsistent results. We analyze individual differences in two forms of local, acoustic-prosodic entrainment in two large corpora between English and Chinese native speakers conversing in English. The few previous studies of the effect of non-nativeness on entrainment that exist were based on much smaller numbers of speakers and focused on perceptual rather than acoustic measures. We find considerable variation in both degree and valence of entrainment behavior across speakers with some consistent trends, such as synchronous behavior being mostly positive in direction and somewhat more prevalent than convergence. However, we do not find entrainment to vary significantly based on gender, native language, or their combination. Instead, we propose as a hypothesis for further study, that gender mediates more complex interactions between sociocultural norms, conversation context, and other factors.