Speech Entrainment in Chinese Story-Style Talk Shows: The Interaction Between Gender and Role

Speech entrainment is evident in short-and-short turn-taking, but entrainment in long-and-short turn-taking, like talk shows, is expected to be different but also evident. We examined three prosodic feature sets of pitch, intensity, and duration (speaking rate) to explore the impact of gender and role interaction between the host and guests on speech entrainment in a Mandarin Chinese talk show corpus. This research consistently showed that intensity remained the robust entraining feature, and the speaking rate was steadily divergent. Another vital result was that the rare occurrence of the final-rising pitch in question types led to dynamic local positive proximity. Besides, it was interesting to note that mixed-gender pairs with different roles showed more dynamic local positive proximity and synchrony on intensity and pitch than same-gender pairs. Taken together, these results suggest the complexity of gender and role interaction on speech entrainment in long-and-short turn-taking.