Speech Convergence

When people engage in verbal interaction, they adjust their speech in order to accommodate to each other. This phenomenon is called Speech Convergence. It is an emergent phenomenon happens during conversation. Although convergence is a well-known phenomenon, its quantitative assessment is still an open area of research. Here, we developed a method using automatic speaker verification technique (GMM-UBM) in order to measure speech convergence. We quantified participants’ initial phonetic fingerprints and tracked their phonetic convergence during the verbal interaction.

Goal: Quantifying speech convergence and mark the time points in the conversation.