Social and situational factors of speaker variability in collaborative dialogues

Abstract

The acoustic features of the speaker’s voice in dialogues are li-able to change due to various situational factors, such as success of communication, social distance between the interlocutors, conversational roles etc. This paper presents an analysis of variation in the basic prosodic features—pitch, intensity, and speech tempo—across speakers’ gender, conversational role (informa-tion leader vs. follower), and social distance. The research is based on the SibLing speech corpus where five degrees of social distance between the interlocutors are presented: there are dialogues between same-gender siblings, same-gender friends, same-gender and opposite-gender strangers, strangers of different age and social status. Each pair of interlocutors played a card-matching game and performed a classical map task. The factor of conversational role revealed a significant influence on all the analysed speech features: pitch, intensity, and speech tempo. Gender was not found to influence speech tempo, unlike pitch and loudness. Social distance was shown to play a significant role for speech tempo (e.g., it tends to be lower in dialogues with strangers of different age and social sta-tus), and also, in interaction with other factors, for pitch and loudness. There was also a significant influence of the type of task: card-matching game vs. map task.