Julia Hirschberg gives Fillmore Lecture at Linguistic Institute

Julia Hirschberg

Hirschberg’s subject was entrainment, the tendency of speakers to align their speaking style with that of a conversation partner. Joint work with Štefan Beňuš, Nishmar Cestero, Agustín Gravano, Rivka Levitan, Sarah Ita Levitan, and Zhihua Xia.

This lecture, entitled Prosodic Entrainment Across Cultures, describes results from experiments on English and Mandarin prosodic entrainment in the Columbia Games Corpus and in the Tongji Games Corpus, large corpora of speech recorded from subjects playing a series of computer games. It discusses also experiments relating entrainment to several social dimensions, including likeability and dominance, and its relationship to higher level prosodic features. A third experiment was carried out using systems that entrain to their users in a set of “Go-Fish” games created in English, Porteño Spanish, and Slovak, as well as other ongoing research studying entrainment in deceptive speech and in linguistic code-switching.

The slides for the talk are here.

This lecture was given July 6 as part of the 2017 Linguistic Institute, sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America and the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences. In addition, Hirschberg gave the course: Intonation and Computation.