A Wizard-of-Oz Experiment to Study Phonetic Accommodation in Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

This paper presents a Wizard-of-Oz experiment designed to study phonetic accommodation in humancomputer interaction. The experiment comprises a dynamic exchange of information between a human interlocutor and a supposedly intelligent system, while allowing for planned manipulation of the system’s speech output on the level of phonetic detail. In the current configuration of the experiment, we are targeting convergence in allophonic contrasts and phenomena of local prosody. A study was conducted with 12 German native speakers. The results of a map task show highly speaker dependent behavior for the contrast [Iç] vs. [Ik] occurring in the German suffix 〈-ig〉: during the baseline production of the target items, speakers either consistently choose one allophone or use both interchangeably. When conversing with the system, some speakers converge to its speech output, while others maintain their preferred variant or even diverge. This reflects individual variation observed in previous work on accommodation.