Acted and Spontaneous Conversational Prosody — Same or Different?

Previous work has shown that read and spontaneous monologues differ prosodically both in production and perception. In this paper, we examine whether similar effects can be found between spontaneous and read, or rather acted, dialogues. It is possible that speakers can mimic conversational prosody very well. Alternatively, they might use prosodic resources more than the conversational situation actually requires (overacting). Another possibility is that in acted dialogues, prosody is actually used less as a communicative device, as there is no need to establish a common ground or to organize the floor between interlocutors. In our study, we examined spontaneous and read dialogues of equal verbal content. The task-oriented dialogues contained a communicative situation implicitly demanding for for a higher speaking rate (time pressure). Our results show that globally, speakers met this conversational demand of increased speaking rate both in the acted and in the spontaneous situation, although we find different global speaking rates between the spontaneous and the acted condition. Also, read speech exhibits a lower F0 minimum and, consequently, a larger F0 range than read speech, which may be explicable by a lack of active turn taking organization. Summing up, acted conversational prosody resembles many features of spontaneous interaction, but also shows systematic differences.