Prosodic Speech Entrainment in Romantic Relationships

In the current study, we investigated prosodic entrainment between romantic partners. We extracted a set of acousticprosodic features from the conversations of twenty-six couples in order to examine (1) the degree to which romantic partners prosodically entrain their speech and (2) whether relationship factors predict romantic partners’ level of entrainment. Using observational ratings and self-report data from the Couples Communication Project corpus, comprised of recordings of couples discussing relationship conflicts and agreements, we investigated whether speech entrainment is associated with (a) couples’ exhibited behavior during the discussions or (b) factors about their relationship. Couples exhibited overall speech entrainment for features of pitch, intensity, voice quality and speech rate. Moreover, entrainment varied with the content of the conversation: couples who entrained during a conflict discussion were less likely to resolve the conflict; conversely, couples who entrained during an agreement discussion were rated as healthier and better collaborators.