The work presented here suggests a method for assessing speech accommodation in a holistic acoustic manner by utilising Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The rationale for implementation of this method is presented along with an explanation of how HMMs work. Here, a heavily simplified HMM is used (single state; mixture of gaussians) in order to assess the applicability of more sophisticated HMMs. Results are presented from a small-scale study of six pairs of female Scottish-English speakers, showing measurement of significant trends and changes in holistic acoustic features of speakers during conversational interaction. Our findings suggest that methods integrating HMMs with current holistic acoustic measures of speech may be a useful tool in accounting for acoustic change due to speaker interaction
