Measuring Prosodic Entrainment in Italian Collaborative Game-Based Dialogues

In a large number of studies, it has been observed that conversational partners tend to adapt each other’s speech over the course of the interaction. This phenomenon, variously named as entrainment, coordination, alignment or adaptation, is widely believed to be crucial to mutual understanding and successful communication in human interaction. Modelling human adaptation in speech behaviour would also be very important for improving naturalness in voiced-based human-machine interaction systems. Recently, a body of research in this field has been devoted to find evidence of prosodic entrainment by measuring a number of acoustic-prosodic parameters in some languages, yet not in Italian. Our study offers a contribution to this research line. We analysed game-based collaborative dialogues between Italian speakers, by measuring their articulation rate, pitch range, pitch level and loudness. Results show some evidence of overall speech coordination (convergence and synchrony) between conversational partners, wherein the combination of specific prosodic parameters involved may vary across dialogues. Our results are in line with those obtained in previous studies on other languages, thus contributing to providing a useful basis for modelling prosodic adaptation in multilingual spoken dialogue systems.