Prosodic and segmental convergence in spontaneous German conversations.
Natalie Lewandowski, Antje Schweitzer · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2010
Phonetic convergence is the process of adapting one’s speech to that of an interlocutor and is hence seen as a dynamic process causing continuous updates in multiple speech parameters. Current methods of measuring phonetic convergence are often impressionistic or perceptual, or have only been tested in limited scenarios. The aim of this ongoing project is to investigate convergence in German in a natural open scenario and to develop computational objective methods of accounting for it. A variety of phonetic parameters with respect to their relevance for convergence will be examined. On the prosodic level, one goal is to examine phonological features such as the prosodic inventory or distribution of prosodic events as well as the detailed phonetic implementation of prosodic events. The latter can be measured by the PaIntE F0 parametrization method. Convergence effects have been shown to be very subtle; thus large amounts of data are required in order to obtain statistically valid and robust results. Developing and implementing a new automatized procedure allows us to use a large corpus of spontaneous speech without foregoing the chance of capturing fine phonetic detail.