ABSTRACT Acoustic-Prosodic Entrainment in Human-Human and Human-Computer Dialogue

Entrainment (sometimes called adaptation or alignment) is the tendency of human speak-ers to adapt to or imitate characteristics of their interlocutors ’ behavior. This work focuses on entrainment on acoustic-prosodic features. Acoustic-prosodic entrainment has been ex-tensively studied but is not well understood. In particular, it is difficult to compare the results of different studies, since entrainment is usually measured in different ways, reflect-ing disparate conceptualizations of the phenomenon. In the first part of this thesis, we look for evidence of entrainment on a variety of acoustic-prosodic features according to various conceptualizations, and show that human speakers of both Standard American English and Mandarin Chinese entrain to each other globally and locally, in synchrony, and that this entrainment can be constant or convergent. We explore the relationship between entrain-ment and gender and show that entrainment on some acoustic-prosodic features is related to social behavior and dialogue coordination. In addition, we show that humans entrain in a novel domain, backchannel-inviting cues, and propose and test a novel hypothesis: that entrainment will be stronger in the case of an outlier feature value. In the second part of the thesis, we describe a method for flexibly and dynamically entraining a TTS voice t