We present the Brooklyn Multi-Interaction Corpus (B-MIC), a collection of dyadic conversations designed to identify speaker traits and conversation contexts that cause variations in entrainment behavior. B-MIC pairs each participant with multiple partners for an object placement game and open-ended discussions, as well as with a Wizard of Oz for a baseline of their speech. In addition to fully transcribed recordings, it includes demographic information and four completed psychological questionnaires for each subject and turn annotations for perceived emotion and acoustic outliers. This enables the study of speakers’ entrainment behavior in different contexts and the sources of variation in this behavior. In this paper, we introduce B-MIC and describe our collection, annotation, and preprocessing methodologies. We report a preliminary study demonstrating varied entrainment behavior across different conversation types and discuss the rich potential for future work on the corpus.

It has been well-documented for several languages that human interlocutors tend to adapt their linguistic productions to become more similar to each other. This behavior, known as entrainment, affects lexical choice as well, both with regard to specific words, such as referring expressions, and overall style. We offer what we believe to be the first investigation of such lexical entrainment in Hebrew. Using two existing measures, we analyze Hebrew speakers interacting in a Map Task, a popular experimental setup, and find rich evidence of lexical entrainment. Analyzing speaker pairs by the combination of their genders as well as speakers by their individual gender, we find no clear pattern of differences. We do, however, find that speakers in a position of less power entrain more than those with greater power, which matches theoretical accounts. Overall, our results mostly accord with those for American English, with a lack of entrainment on hedge words being the main difference.

Entrainment has been shown to occur for various linguistic features individually. Motivated by cognitive theories regarding linguistic entrainment, we analyze speakers’ overall entrainment behaviors and search for an underlying structure. We consider various measures of both acoustic-prosodic and lexical entrainment, measuring the latter with a novel application of two previously introduced methods in addition to a standard high-frequency word measure. We present a negative result of our search, finding no meaningful correlations, clusters, or principal components in various entrainment measures, and discuss practical and theoretical implications.