Phonetic accommodation of human interlocutors in the context of human-computer interaction
Abstract: Phonetic accommodation refers to the phenomenon that interlocutors adapt their way of speaking to each other within an interaction. This can have a positive influence on the communication quality. As we increasingly use spoken language to interact with computers these days, the phenomenon of phonetic accommodation is also investigated in the context of human-computer interaction: on the one hand, to find out whether speakers adapt to a computer agent in a similar way as they do to a human interlocutor, on the other hand, to implement accommodation behavior in spoken dialog systems and explore how this affects their users. To date, the focus has been mainly on the global acoustic-prosodic level. The present work demonstrates that speakers interacting with a computer agent also identify locally anchored phonetic phenomena such as segmental allophonic variation and local prosodic features as accommodation targets and converge on them. To this end, we conducted two experiments. First, we applied the shadowing method, where the participants repeated short sentences from natural and synthetic model speakers. In the second experiment, we used the Wizard-of-Oz method, in which an intelligent spoken dialog system is simulated, to enable a dynamic exchange between the participants and a computer agent — the virtual language learning tutor Mirabella. The target language of our experiments was German. Phonetic convergence occurred in both experiments when natural voices were used as well as when synthetic voices were used as stimuli. Moreover, both native and non-native speakers of the target language converged to Mirabella. Thus, accommodation could be relevant, for example, in the context of computer-assisted language learning. Individual variation in accommodation behavior can be attributed in part to speaker-specific characteristics, one of which is assumed to be the personality structure. We included the Big Five personality traits as well as the concept of mental boundaries in the analysis of our data. Different personality traits influenced accommodation to different types of phonetic features. Mental boundaries have not been studied before in the context of phonetic accommodation. We created a validated German adaptation of a questionnaire that assesses the strength of mental boundaries. The latter can be used in future studies involving mental boundaries in native speakers of German.
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