Pause and gap length in face-to-face interaction

Abstract

It has long been noted that conversational partners tend to exhibit increasingly similar pitch, intensity, and timing behavior over the course of a conversation. However, the metrics developed to measure this similarity to date have generally failed to capture the dynamic temporal aspects of this process. In this paper, we propose new approaches to measuring interlocutor similarity in spoken dialogue. We define similarity in terms of convergence and synchrony and propose approaches to capture these, illustrating our techniques on gap and pause production in Swedish spontaneous dialogues. Copyright © 2009 ISCA.