Speech dominoes and phonetic convergence

Interlocutors are known to mutually adapt during conversation. Recent studies have questioned the adaptation of phonological representations and kinematics of phonetic variables such as loudness, speech rate or fundamental frequency. Results are often contradictory and the effectiveness of phonetic convergence during conversation is still an open issue. This paper describes an original experimental paradigm – a game played in primary schools known as verbal dominoes that enables us to collect several hundreds of syllables uttered by both speakers in different conditions: alone, in ambient speech or in full interaction. Speech recognition techniques are then applied to globally characterize phonetic convergence if any. We hypothesize here that convergence of phonetic representations such as vocalic dispersions is not immediate especially when considering common words of the target language.