It could be a sign that you're engaged in the conversation or the task at hand if you caught yourself talking to someone and thought, "Oh, I sound just like them".
A new study shows that the same thing happens when you solve puzzles in virtual game environments.
Researchers have found that when two people talk about an attractive topic, the sounds of their speeches are more likely to come together.
The other person may say certain words without prompting. They can change their pronunciation to match their converser or change their sentence structure to better align with their friend.
Experiments show that the mimicking of sounds is a common feature of human speech.
The changes seem to be different depending on the content of the conversation and the goal of the chat.
The experimenters found that when speakers are highly engaged in a task, they emphasize words more than they would if they just read colors from a computer screen.
It is possible that the goal of a task and the level of participant engagement can affect the sound of a speech.
The study extends the video game experiment from last year.
The authors of the new research wanted to look at how speech production changes when a task is engaging and involves a partner.
52 native English speakers were divided into pairs. The pairs had to complete a number of tasks together.
Talker A had to help their partner, Talker B, who was seated in an adjacent room, navigate around a colorfulMinecraft scene using target words laid out in a virtual maze on their respective computer screens.
Talker A only had to read aloud words on a screen to Talker B, who then picked the right words on their screen.
The researchers heard more convergence in the speech of Talker A and Talker B.
Talker A is identified as having durationally longer productions compared to their partner, Talker B, at the beginning of an interaction.
If Talker A shortened their productions over the course of the experiment, this would be taken as evidence that Talker B did the same thing.
A study suggests that engaging conversations lead to more mimicking. When their attention was more focused on a game, speakers were more likely to adapt their speech to the sounds of their partners.
This suggests that humans might be able to create synergy with one another in order to reduce the chance of being misinterpreted.
The study only looks at native English speakers and acoustic features of speech. It was too small to tease out the subtle acoustic changes that can occur during a conversation.
"It is one thing to focus on the sound level, but other things happen at the language level, like using words someone may not normally use," says communication scientist Navin Viswanathan.
In the current study, the high engagement task resulted in more conversations between the partners. It's possible that speakers in the video game scenario were given more time to learn and mimic the nuances of their partner's speech.
The initial results suggest that mimicry is not always a joke.
The voices of others can make us feel bad.
The study was published in a journal.
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