Speech Units Workshop

Dialogues are cooperative joint actions and interlocutors commit to the goal of mutual understanding by adjusting their idiolect based on the particular talker-listener combination. A peculiar form of adaptation is vocal accommodation - i.e. the tendency for talkers to adjust aspects of their acoustic–phonetic attributes to those of another talker - that results in measurable increased or decreased distance between interlocutors’ vocal repertoires with impact on individual vocal discriminability. In this talk, I will outline interactional spaces suitable for eliciting vocal accommodation, propose strategies to select the acoustic attributes for comparison and discuss analytic approaches (e.g. acoustic, perceptual, acoustic and perceptual) to quantifying convergence/divergence with and without baseline recordings. Finally, I will present a line of research exploring the impact of speech convergence on individual vocal discriminability.