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Social Aspects of Entrainment in Spoken Interaction

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Abstract

Speech entrainment is the tendency of interlocutors to become similar to each other during spoken interaction. Entrainment is a natural component of the cognitive system underlying communication, and the alignment of cognitive (para)linguistic representations between interlocutors is one way of conceptualizing it. Speech entrainment also plays an important social role, since humans perceive people who entrain to their speaking style as more socially attractive and likeable, more competent and intimate, and conversations with such partners as more successful. Furthermore, dis-entrainment might signal an increase in social distance and a negative attitude towards the interlocutor. Importantly for social robotics, humans also entrain to computer systems, and implementing this idea has brought improvements in several domains of human–machine interaction. This paper provides a targeted overview of advances in speech entrainment and argues that entrainment should be exploited in applications in which communication between humans and robots uses speech, as it opens up possibilities for developing and controlling social relations such as likeability and dominance and makes the applications more efficient.

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Notes

  1. More natural dynamic and bi-directional aspects of entrainment in HRI will be briefly discussed in section “Discussion and Conclusion”.

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Acknowledgments

This work results from the project implementation: Technology research for the management of business processes in heterogeneous distributed systems in real time with the support of multi-modal communication, ITMS 26240220060 supported by the Research and Development Operational Programme funded by the ERDF, and was also supported in part by VEGA 1/0547/14 grant. The author is indebted to Julia Hirschberg, Agustin Gravano, and Rivka Levitan. All mistakes are the sole responsibility of the author.

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  1. Constantine the Philosopher University, Stefanikova 67, 94974, Nitra, Slovakia

    Štefan Beňuš

  2. Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Štefan Beňuš

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Correspondence to Štefan Beňuš.

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Beňuš, Š. Social Aspects of Entrainment in Spoken Interaction. Cogn Comput 6, 802–813 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-014-9261-4

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