Healthy Communication Partners Modify Their Speech When Conversing With Individuals With Parkinson's Disease.

Purpose For individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD), conversational interactions can be challenging. Efforts to improve the success of these interactions have largely fallen on the individual with PD. Successful communication, however, involves contributions from both the individual with PD and their communication partner. The current study examines whether healthy communication partners naturally engage in different acoustic-prosodic behavior (speech compensations) when conversing with an individual with PD and, further, whether such behavior aids communication success. Method Measures of articulatory precision, speaking rate, and pitch variability were extracted from the speech of healthy speakers engaged in goal-directed dialogue with other healthy speakers (healthy-healthy dyads) and with individuals with PD (healthy-PD dyads). Speech compensations, operationally defined as significant differences in healthy speakers' acoustic-prosodic behavior in healthy-healthy dyads versus healthy-PD dyads, were calculated for the three speech behaviors. Finally, the relationships between speech behaviors and an objective measure of communicative efficiency were examined. Results Healthy speakers engaged in speech characterized by greater articulatory precision and slower speaking rate when conversing with individuals with PD relative to conversations with other healthy individuals. However, these adaptive speech compensations were not predictive of communicative efficiency. Conclusions Evidence that healthy speakers naturally engage in speech compensations when conversing with individuals with PD is novel, yet consistent with findings from studies with other populations in which conversation can be challenging. In the case of PD, these compensatory behaviors did not support communication outcomes. While preliminary in nature, the results raise important questions regarding the speech behavior of healthy communication partners and provide directions for future work.

Conversational Coordination of Articulation Responds to Context: A Clinical Test Case With Traumatic Brain Injury.

Purpose Coordination of communicative behavior supports shared understanding in conversation. The current study brings together analysis of two speech coordination strategies, entrainment and compensation of articulation, in a preliminary investigation into whether strategy organization is shaped by a challenging communicative context-conversing with a person who has a communication disorder. Method As an initial clinical test case, an automated measure of articulatory precision was analyzed in a corpus of spoken dialogue, where a confederate conversed with participants with traumatic brain injury (n = 28) and participants with no brain injury (n = 48). Results Overall, the confederate engaged in significant entrainment and high compensation (hyperarticulation) in conversations with participants with traumatic brain injury relative to significant entrainment and low compensation (hypoarticulation) in conversations with participants with no brain injury. Furthermore, the confederate's articulatory precision changed over the course of the conversations. Conclusions Findings suggest that the organization of conversational coordination is sensitive to context, supporting synergistic models of spoken dialogue. While corpus limitations are acknowledged, these initial results point to differences in the way in which speech strategies are realized in challenging communicative contexts, highlighting a viable and important target for investigation with clinical populations. A framework for investigating speech coordination strategies in tandem and ideas for advancing this line of inquiry serve as key contributions of this work.

Do Conversational Partners Entrain on Articulatory Precision?

The communication phenomenon known as conversational entrainment occurs when dialogue partners align or adapt their behavior to one another while conversing. Associated with rapport, trust, and communicative efficiency, entrainment appears to facilitate conversational success. In this work, we explore how conversational partners entrain or align on articulatory precision or the clarity with which speakers articulate their spoken productions. Articulatory precision also has implications for conversational success as precise articulation can enhance speech understanding and intelligibility. However, in conversational speech, speakers tend to reduce their articulatory precision, preferring low-cost, imprecise speech. Speakers may adapt their articulation and become more precise depending on feedback from their listeners. Given the potential of entrainment, we are interested in how conversational partners adapt or entrain their articulatory precision to one another. We explore this phenomenon in 57 task-based dialogues. Controlling for the influence of speaking rate, we find that speakers entrain on articulatory precision, with significant alignment on articulation of consonants. We discuss the potential applications that speaker alignment on precision might have for modeling conversation and implementing strategies for enhancing communicative success in human-human and human-computer interactions.

Disordered speech disrupts conversational entrainment: a study of acoustic-prosodic entrainment and communicative success in populations with communication challenges.

Conversational entrainment, a pervasive communication phenomenon in which dialogue partners adapt their behaviors to align more closely with one another, is considered essential for successful spoken interaction. While well-established in other disciplines, this phenomenon has received limited attention in the field of speech pathology and the study of communication breakdowns in clinical populations. The current study examined acoustic-prosodic entrainment, as well as a measure of communicative success, in three distinctly different dialogue groups: (i) healthy native vs. healthy native speakers (Control), (ii) healthy native vs. foreign-accented speakers (Accented), and (iii) healthy native vs. dysarthric speakers (Disordered). Dialogue group comparisons revealed significant differences in how the groups entrain on particular acoustic-prosodic features, including pitch, intensity, and jitter. Most notably, the Disordered dialogues were characterized by significantly less acoustic-prosodic entrainment than the Control dialogues. Further, a positive relationship between entrainment indices and communicative success was identified. These results suggest that the study of conversational entrainment in speech pathology will have essential implications for both scientific theory and clinical application in this domain.