title: Pitch contour matching and interactional alignment across turns: an acoustic investigation.
abstract: In order to explore the influence of context on the phonetic design of talk-in-interaction, we investigated the pitch characteristics of short turns (insertions) that are produced by one speaker between turns from another speaker. We investigated the hypothesis that the speaker of the insertion designs her turn as a pitch match to the prior turn in order to align with the previous speaker's agenda, whereas non-matching displays that the speaker of the insertion is non-aligning, for example to initiate a new action. Data were taken from the AMI meeting corpus, focusing on the spontaneous talk of first-language English participants. Using sequential analysis, 177 insertions were classified as either aligning or non-aligning in accordance with definitions of these terms in the Conversation Analysis literature. The degree of similarity between the pitch contour of the insertion and that of the prior speaker's turn was measured, using a new technique that integrates normalized F0 and intensity information. The results showed that aligning insertions were significantly more similar to the immediately preceding turn, in terms of pitch contour, than were non-aligning insertions. This supports the view that choice of pitch contour is managed locally, rather than by reference to an intonational lexicon.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 21 I Portobello, Sheffield S1 4DP, UK J.Gorisch@sheffield.ac.uk
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gorisch
authors.forename: Bill
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wells
authors.forename: Guy J
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Brown
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D010700:Phonetics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D012919:Social Behavior; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014833:Voice Quality