Lab Research

Our research has shown that while linguistic entrainment skills are developed early in a child's life (Chieng et al., 2024),  speech entrainment skills are not (see Wynn et al., 2019; Chieng et al., in press). Rather, these skills are developed gradually during adolescents and are predictive of conversational success in this age group (see Wynn et al., 2023). More projects examining these developmental patterns in more detail are currently in progress!

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 are currently launching an NIH-funded large-scale study in this area!

We have also examined the individual factors that impact entrainment in autistic children (see Maltman, Wynn et al., 2025).

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 are also focused on creating tools to make entrainment analyses easier for researchers. One tool, Autoscribe, can be used to segment and transcribe conversations into Praat textgrids (see Barrett, Wynn et al., 2025. This tool is free, open source, and user-friendly. 

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!

Yes! Our research has shown that we adjust our coordination strategies according to the goals of specific conversations (Wynn et al., 2024) and who we are speaking with (Borrie, Wynn, et al., 2020). 

In a recent paper, we introduced a novel framework to describe the interplay between entrainment mechanisms and these contextual factors (see Wynn et al., 2025)

Conversational success can mean so many different things! We have a number of ongoing studies exploring what conversational success is, how we measure it, and how the definition of success varies across groups. Our latest study (Wynn et al., 2025) examines how success may be driven by different things based on the cultural and sociodemographic values of different groups of people. 

We have also developed a measure of conversational success that can be used by both researchers and clinicians (see Wynn et al., under review). A copy of this measure can be found HERE.