Lexical, syntactic, semantic and acoustic entrainment in Slovak, Spanish, English, and Hungarian: A cross-linguistic comparison

Abstract

Entrainment is the tendency of speakers to reuse each other’s linguistic material, including lexical, syntactic, semantic, or acoustic–prosodic, during a conversation. While entrainment has been studied in English and other Germanic languages, it is less researched in other language groups. In this study, we evaluated lexical, syntactic, semantic, and acoustic–prosodic entrainment in four comparable spoken corpora of four typologically different languages (English, Slovak, Spanish, and Hungarian) using comparable tools and methodologies based on DNN embeddings. Our cross-linguistic comparison revealed that Hungarian speakers are closer to their interlocutors and more consistent with their own linguistic features when compared to English, Slovak, and Spanish speakers. Further, comparison across different linguistic levels within each language revealed that speakers are closest to their partners and most consistent with their own linguistic features at the acoustic level, followed by semantic, lexical, and syntactic levels. Examining the four languages separately, we found that people’s tendency to be close to each other at each turn (proximity) varies at different linguistic levels in different languages. Additionally, we found that entrainment in lexical, syntactic, semantic, and acoustic–prosodic features are positively correlated in all four datasets. Our results are relevant for the predictions of Interactive Alignment theory (Pickering and Garrod, 2004) and may facilitate implementing entrainment functionality in human–machine interactions (HMI).