A key goal for participants in language communication is to bring about a mutually shared experience of ideas, event narratives, and emotional responses. This goal is achieved not only through the exchange of lexical meaning, but also through interactive signaling to coordinate information status. Our results show that prosodic synchrony (convergence) and dissynchrony (divergence) both occur in conversation, and that synchrony is achieved gradually as participants cooperate to build up a shared information and involvement state. Our analysis further indicates that feedback is a critical component of cooperative adaptation to new information, bringing about convergent speaker states.
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