Cross-cultural Investigation of Prosody in Verbal Feedback in Interactional Rapport

Aspects of speech and non-verbal behavior allow conversational partners to establish and maintain rapport by signaling engagement or endorsement. In the verbal channel, these factors encompass requests for and production of vocal feedback, as well as lexical and grammatical mirroring. However, these cues are often subtle and culture-specific. Here, we present a preliminary investigation of the differences in elicitation and provision of vocal feedback across three diverse language/cultural groups: American English, Gulf/Iraqi Arabic, and Mexican Spanish. We describe our corpus of unrehearsed dyadic story-telling interactions, with listeners who had been instructed to be "active and engaged." Based on a fully-transcribed and aligned sub-corpus of 79 interactions, we identify fundamental contrasts in expectations for and production of vocal feedback. We identify dramatic differences in the rates of listener verbal feedback across the groups. However, we find that some significant pitch-related prosodic contrasts are robustly employed across these diverse groups, while we do find differences in the use of other pitch and intensity cues. These differences will inform the development of culturally-sensitive conversational agents, able to engage in more effective dialogue.