Conversational quality is affected by and reflected in prosodic entrainment

Prosodic entrainment is connected to various forms of communicative success. One possibility to assess successful communication in non-task-oriented everyday conversations is through the participants’ perception of conversational quality. In this study we investigate whether a speaker’s degree of prosodic entrainment reflects the perceived conversational quality in dating conversations. Furthermore, we ask whether prosodic entrainment can influence the perceived conversational quality in return. Based on 98 spontaneous mixed-sex dating conversations we find that conversational quality has a significant effect on a speaker’s degree of pitch level entrainment. Furthermore, pitch entrainment also has a significant effect on how one’s interlocutor perceives the conversational quality. However, we find differences between the two effects which suggests that what a speaker does in reaction to increased perceived conversational quality is not necessarily what an interlocutor perceives as increased conversational quality. Accordingly, while we find a bidirectional influence of prosodic entrainment and perceived conversational quality, this connection is not reciprocal in nature.