Investigating prosodic entrainment from global conversations to local turns and tones in Mandarin conversations

Abstract

Previous research on acoustic entrainment has paid less attention to tones than to other prosodic features. This study sets a hierarchical framework by three layers of conversations, turns and tone units, investigates prosodic entrainment in Mandarin spontaneous dialogues at each level, and compares the three. Our research has found that (1) global and local entrainment exist independently, and local entrainment is more evident than global; (2) variation exists in prosodic features’ contribution to entrainment at three levels: amplitude features exhibiting more prominent entrainment at both global and local levels, and speaking-rate and F0 features showing more prominence at the local levels; and (3) no convergence is found at the conversational level, at the turn level or over tone units.