Prosodic Synchrony in Co-Operative Task-Based Dialogues: A Measure of Agreement and Disagreement

Prosodic synchrony has been reported to be an important aspect of conversational dyads. In this paper, synchrony in four different dyads is examined. A Time Aligned Moving Average (TAMA) procedure is used to temporally align the prosodic measurements for the detection of synchrony in the dyads. An overlapping windowed correlation procedure is used to measure synchrony for six different prosodic parameters: mean pitch, pitch range, mean intensity, intensity range, centre of gravity and spectral slope. This study shows that a windowed correlation procedure better captures the dynamic nature of speech synchrony than a single measure across a whole conversation. This method also enables points of concurrent synchrony between prosodic parameters to be detected. Moreover, the synchrony of the prosodic parameters was considered in relation to levels of agreement and disagreement in the four dyads. Results show only one parameter in one dyad to be significantly correlated with agreement/disagreement.