Two Partners, One Voice: Prosodic Speech Entrainment in Romantic Relationships

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dc.contributorHaydon, Katherine
dc.contributor.advisorBreen, Mara
dc.contributor.authorWeidman, Sarah
dc.date.accessioned2015-05-20T12:52:50Z
dc.date.available2015-05-20T12:52:50Z
dc.date.gradyear2015en_US
dc.date.issued2015-05-20
dc.description.abstractPrevious research has demonstrated that speech entrainment, the tendency of conversational partners to match their speech, may be associated with positive social outcomes. The purpose of this study is to investigate speech entrainment in arguably one of the most important contexts: between romantic partners. Through an analysis of acoustic-prosodic features extracted from recordings of twenty-one couples engaged in conversation, I examine (1) the degree to which romantic partners prosodically entrain their speech and (2) what factors contribute to romantic partners’ level of prosodic speech entrainment. Using information and behavioral measurements collected from the Couples Communication Project corpus, I investigate whether couples’ speech entrainment is dependent on factors such as the length of their relationship, the health of their relationship, and the content of their conversations. Results demonstrate that romantic partners exhibited significant speech entrainment at both a local and global level. No significant differences were found between the degree that couples prosodically entrained and the examined factors. I argue that these findings suggest that speech entrainment between romantic partners is more relevant to momentary interactions, rather than being dependent on general relationship features. I further suggest that this study is limited by the audio recordings and nature of the sample used for analysis, and that extra research is necessary to explore other social factors that may contribute to speech entrainment within romantic relationships.en_US
dc.description.sponsorshipPsychology & Educationen_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10166/3638
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.rights.restrictedpublicen_US
dc.subjectProsodyen_US
dc.subjectSpeech Entrainmenten_US
dc.subjectRomantic Relationshipsen_US
dc.subjectEntrainmenten_US
dc.subjectSpeechen_US
dc.titleTwo Partners, One Voice: Prosodic Speech Entrainment in Romantic Relationshipsen_US
dc.typeThesis
mhc.degreeUndergraduateen_US
mhc.institutionMount Holyoke College

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