Social Aspects of Entrainment in Spoken Interaction

Speech entrainment is the tendency of interlocutors to become similar to each other during spoken interaction. Entrainment is a natural component of the cognitive system underlying communication, and the alignment of cognitive (para)linguistic representations between interlocutors is one way of conceptualizing it. Speech entrainment also plays an important social role, since humans perceive people who entrain to their speaking style as more socially attractive and likeable, more competent and intimate, and conversations with such partners as more successful. Furthermore, dis-entrainment might signal an increase in social distance and a negative attitude towards the interlocutor. Importantly for social robotics, humans also entrain to computer systems, and implementing this idea has brought improvements in several domains of human-machine interaction. This paper provides a targeted overview of advances in speech entrainment and argues that entrainment should be exploited in applications in which communication between humans and robots uses speech, as it opens up possibilities for developing and controlling social relations such as likeability and dominance and makes the applications more efficient.