Re-enacted and Spontaneous Conversational Prosody — How Different?

Previous work has shown that read and spontaneous monologues differ prosodically both in production and perception. In this paper, we examine to which extent similar effects can be found between spontaneous and read, or rather re-enacted, dialogues. It is possible that speakers can mimic conversational prosody very well. Another possibility is that in re-enacted 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 calling for for a higher speaking rate (time pressure). Our results show that overall, speakers met this conversational demand of increased speaking rate both in the reenacted and in the spontaneous situation, although we find different global speaking rates between conditions. Also, read speech exhibits a lower F0 minimum and, consequently, a larger F0 range than spontaneous conversations, which may be explicable by a lack of active turn taking organization. Summing up, re-enacted conversational prosody resembles many features of spontaneous interaction, but also shows systematic differences.