Prosodic Accommodation in Face-to-Face and Telephone Dialogues

The study of phonetic accommodation in various communicative situations is still relatively limited. This paper examines accommodation in spontaneous conversations of eight pairs of Czech young male speakers in two communicative conditions: unconstrained face-to-face conversation and goal-oriented interaction via mobile telephone. Articulation rate and measures of f0 level, range and variability were measured in 40 prosodic phrases per speaker in each condition. Analyses of LME models did not reveal a significant global effect of time throughout the interaction on the distance between speakers (convergence) in any of the examined parameters, or that of preceding phrase value on the subsequent turn-initial value (synchrony). However, more consistent patterns were observed when speaker pairs were examined separately, revealing substantial individual variation on the one hand and non-linear effects on the other. This shows that aggregate analyses can be misleading in the study of phonetic accommodation and that speakers dynamically employ different strategies throughout natural conversations.