Entrainment in spontaneous speech: The case of filled pauses in Supreme Court hearings

The aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of communicative social signals through a study of entrainment in the quality of filled pauses produced by Justices and lawyers during oral arguments of the Supreme Court. We report a tendency that the similarity between immediately adjacent filled pauses between a Justice and a lawyer correlates with the favorability of the Justice's vote. In addition to learning more about our cognitive abilities, we believe that better understanding of accommodation patterns is useful for increasing number of applications relaying on spoken interactions between humans and computers.