P77Session 1 (Monday 12 January 2026, 15:00-17:30)Exploring conversational entrainment in noise
Over the course of an interaction interlocutors tend to behave increasingly like one another. This phenomenon, also referred to as entrainment, can be observed on multiple levels of conversational behavior, from movement to word choice to acoustic features of speech. Entrainment is believed to facilitate conversational flow and improve interpersonal rapport in social interaction. In speech, prosodic entrainment, including pitch (f0) and stress patterns, is often observed. Since f0 may serve as an important cue in turn-end prediction, f0 entrainment could potentially support interlocutors maintaining the flow of their conversation. However, entrainment is commonly studied in quiet settings. To the authors’ knowledge, the effect of noise on f0 entrainment in conversation has not yet been studied. Some studies have found that people have reduced perception of f0 in noise. And since theoretical accounts suggest that entrainment relies on a close link between perception and production, we might expect that having reduced access to f0 would decrease entrainment. However, speakers are known to raise their f0 in noise, potentially as a compensatory strategy to enhance signal clarity. This could, in turn, preserve or even enhance entrainment despite the degraded perceptual environment. In this preliminary analysis, we take a first step toward investigating how background noise affects f0 entrainment in dyadic conversation. Whether such prosodic adjustments ultimately support conversational coordination remains an open question for future research. We collected data from 24 older (average of 63.2 years) native Danish speakers with age-adjusted normal hearing, grouped into 12 conversational pairs. The speakers in a dyad were of opposite gender and were asked to solve the Diapix task (a spot-the-difference task) together by conversing in quiet, as well as 60 dBA and 70 dBA multi-talker babble noise. Each condition was repeated twice, resulting in a total of six conversations per dyad. The conversations were recorded through head worn microphones. We extracted f0 from these conversations using the parselmouth library in Python. We will present preliminary results examining f0 entrainment between interlocutors in quiet as well as in different background noise levels. The results will offer initial insights into how background noise affects prosodic coordination with implications for future studies on conversational dynamics in adverse conditions. Future research could explore entrainment in noisy environments, particularly in relation to individuals with hearing loss, who often experience increased difficulty in perceiving prosodic cues and coordinating effectively during conversations in noise.