Analyzing vocal tract movements during speech accommodation

Sankar Mukherjee (1) , Thierry Legou (2) , Leonardo Lancia (3) , Pauline Hilt (1) , Alice Tomassini (1) , Luciano Fadiga (1) , Alessandro d'Ausilio (1) , Leonardo Badino (1) , Noël Nguyen (2)

1 IIT - Italian Institute of Technology = Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
2 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage
3 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

When two people engage in verbal interaction, they tend to accommodate on a variety of linguistic levels. Although recent attention has focused on to the acoustic characteristics of convergence in speech, the underlying articulatory mechanisms remain to be explored. Using 3D electromagnetic articulography (EMA), we simultaneously recorded articulatory movements in two speakers engaged in an interactive verbal game, the domino task. In this task, the two speakers take turn in chaining bi-syllabic words according to a rhyming rule. By using a robust speaker identification strategy, we identified for which specific words speakers converged or diverged. Then, we explored the different vocal tract features characterizing speech accommodation. Our results suggest that tongue movements tend to slow down during convergence whereas maximal jaw opening during convergence and divergence differs depending on syllable position.

Mots clés: Speech Convergence; Dual EMA; human- human interaction

Domaines: Linguistique

Sankar Mukherjee, Thierry Legou, Leonardo Lancia, Pauline Hilt, Alice Tomassini, et al.. Analyzing vocal tract movements during speech accommodation. Interspeech 2018, Sep 2018, Hyderabad, India. Paper 2084, ⟨10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2084⟩. ⟨hal-01848354⟩