Synchronous speech and semantic incongruity: what do outliers tell us about it?

Abstract

Synchronous speech, considered to be an easily performed task, is investigated in two experimental conditions designated as original (OC) and altered (AC), with focus on the outliers’ behavior. The hypothesis raised is that AC, which offers semantic incongruities, would lead individuals to a poorer synchronization performance, i.e, producing greater lag duration. Divided equally in two groups (A and B), 24 dyads were recorded reading two fables in Brazilian Portuguese, in both original and altered conditions. Asynchrony duration was obtained by extracting the lag between vowel onsets, after aligning speakers’ waveforms in each dyad. Considering results related to the entire dataset, speakers are able to synchronize in both conditions (OC and AC). However, a great number of outliers was observed throughout the dataset. Its distribution in AC is significantly different from the distribution in OC, the former showing greater values for both variance and mean. In this exploratory study, one promising explanation for these results will be discussed taking into account aspects such as the outliers’ location throughout the text. These initial results prompt further investigation, in order to verify a more accurate relation between the outliers’ duration and the semantic incongruities' place of occurrence.