Lab Research
Research Goals
Our focus on conversational coordination and its role in successful interactions can be broken into three distinctive goals. Ultimately, we hope research in these areas can be used to develop strategies for both neurotypical and neurodivergent people to increase success in their interactions.
recent/Current Projects
To date, much of our work has focused on conversational entrainment, the coordinative strategy in which speakers modify their communicative behaviors to match their conversational partner. Going forward, we plan to expand our research to investigate other coordinative behaviors as well. Click any question below to read more about specific projects we have completed or are currently working on in the lab!
Our research has shown that speech entrainment skills in children are not as robust as in adults (see Wynn et al., 2019). Rather, these skills are developed gradually during adolescents and are predictive of conversational success in this age group (see Wynn et al., 2023). Future studies will focus on the developmental trajectories of other conversational coordination strategies and individual differences in coordination development.
In an initial study in this area, we found that entrainment patterns of autistic adults are not as pronounced as patterns of neurotypical adults (see Wynn et al., 2018). We have collected pilot data to examine entrainment in autistic adolescents and hope to soon launch a larger study in this area!
For additional work on differences in the speech characteristics of neurotypical and autistic individuals, see Wynn et al., 2022.
Speech entrainment is measured in so many different ways! To create more cohesion, we conducted an extensive literature review of entrainment methodologies used across studies. With this information, we modified and expanded upon an existing framework to more comprehensively classify entrainment (see Wynn & Borrie, 2022). We have also highlighted the ways in which differences in experimental methodologies significantly impact entrainment outcomes (see Wynn & Borrie, 2020). In the future, we plan to explore which entrainment measures most closely predict conversational success. We also hope to create an open-source automated method for quantifying speech entrainment.
In a recent study, we showed that in neurotypical adults, rhythm perception abilities led to higher levels of entrainment which, in turn, led to conversational success (see Wynn et al., 2022). This suggests that neurodivergent populations that have challenges with rhythm perception may have difficulty entraining to others and this may effect their conversational outcomes. Stay tuned for more work in this area!
Theoretically, it would make sense that we would adjust our coordination strategies according to the needs of specific conversations. Our research has shown that conversational coordination patterns do change when speaking to someone with vs. without a communication disorder (see Borrie, Wynn, et al., 2020). We are currently working on other research showing that speech patterns also vary based on conversational function. Keep your eyes out for more publications in this area!
There are many ways to determine if a conversation was "successful". We are interested in exploring what conversational success means to different groups of people (e.g., austistic vs. neurotypical people; adolescents vs. adults) and if the perception of conversational success varies across these groups. Watch this space for future papers from us in this area!