Phonetic accommodation to natural and synthetic voices: Behavior of groups and individuals in speech shadowing

• Published in: Speech communication Vol. 127; pp. 43 - 63
• Main Authors: Gessinger, Iona, Raveh, Eran, Steiner, Ingmar, Möbius, Bernd
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.03.2021; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Accentuation; Accommodation; Convergence; Epenthesis; German; German language; Human-computer interaction; Human-human interaction; Phonetic accommodation; Phonetics; Shadowing; Spectral energy distribution; Speech; Speech shadowing; Speech synthesis; Synthetic speech; Synthetic speech; Human-computer interaction; Human-human interaction; Phonetic accommodation; German; Speech shadowing
• ISSN: 0167-6393; 1872-7182
• DOI: 10.1016/j.specom.2020.12.004

The present study investigates whether native speakers of German phonetically accommodate to natural and synthetic voices in a shadowing experiment. We aim to determine whether this phenomenon, which is frequently found in HHI, also occurs in HCI involving synthetic speech. The examined features pertain to different phonetic domains: allophonic variation, schwa epenthesis, realization of pitch accents, word-based temporal structure and distribution of spectral energy. On the individual level, we found that the participants converged to varying subsets of the examined features, while they maintained their baseline behavior in other cases or, in rare instances, even diverged from the model voices. This shows that accommodation with respect to one particular feature may not predict the behavior with respect to another feature. On the group level, the participants of the natural condition converged to all features under examination, however very subtly so for schwa epenthesis. The synthetic voices, while partly reducing the strength of effects found for the natural voices, triggered accommodating behavior as well. The predominant pattern for all voice types was convergence during the interaction followed by divergence after the interaction. •We present a comparison of phonetic accommodation to natural and synthetic voices when shadowing short sentences.•The study investigates a diverse set of features pertaining to different phonetic domains.•Natural and synthetic voices triggered accommodating behavior for several features.•Predominant pattern: convergence during the interaction followed by divergence after the interaction.•Individual participants converged to varying subsets of the examined features.