Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Key Terms 1.1.1 Entrainment 1.1.2 Speech Prosody 1.1.3 Prosodic Entrainment 1.2 Motivations 1.3 Research Questions 1.4 Significance 1.5 Structure of the Thesis Chapter 2 Relevant Studies 2.1 Theoretical Research 2.1.1 Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) 2.1.2 The Chameleon Effect and Perception-Behavior Link 2.1.3 Interactive Alignment Model 2.2 Empirical Research 2.2.1 Studies of Entrainment over Language Components 2.2.2 Studies of Entrainment and Its Pragmatic Functions 2.3 Differences Between the Present Study and the Previous Ones Chapter 3 Corpus and Annotation 3.1 Tongji Games Corpus 3.1.1 Subjects 3.1.2 Facilities and Settings 3.1.3 Games 3.1.4 Gender Groups Control 3.1.5 Roles Control 3.1.6 Tone Units in Carrier Sentences 3.1.7 Corpus Description 3.2 Annotation 3.2.1 IPU Segmentation 3.2.2 Annotation in Praat 3.2.3 F0 Modification 3.2.4 Variables 3.2.5 Data Extraction 3.2.6 Weighted Average of Larger Units than IPUs 3.2.7 Turn Identification Chapter 4 Entrainment at Multiple Levels 4.1 Entrainment at Conversation Level 4.1.1 Proximity at Conversation Level 4.1.2 Convergence at Conversation Level 4.1.3 Entrainment Degree at Conversation Level 4.1.4 Summary of the Results 4.2 Entrainment at Turn Level 4.2.1 Proximity at Turn Level 4.2.2 Convergence at Turn Level 4.2.3 Synchrony at Turn Level 4.2.4 Summary of Results 4.3 Entrainment over Tone Units 4.3.1 Proximity over Tone Units 4.3.2 Convergence over Tone Units 4.3.3 Synchrony over Tone Units 4.3.4 Entrainment of Tones 4.3.5 Summary of Results 4.4 Cross-level Comparison 4.4.1 Comparison of Proximity 4.4.2 Comparisons of Convergence 4.4.3 Comparison of Synchrony 4.5 Discussions Chapter 5 Entrainment from Social Aspect 5.1 Entrainment and Gender 5.1.1 Proximity of Pairs with Different Gender Combination 5.1.2 Entrainment Degree of the Pairs with Different Gender Combination 5.1.3 Summary of the Results 5.2 Entrainment and Role 5.2.1 Role Influence Test 5.2.2 Role Direction Test 5.2.3 Summary of the Results 5.3 Discussion Chapter 6 Comparison of Prosodic Entrainment with English 6.1 Two Corpora 6.1.1 Columbia Games Corpus 6.1.2 The Relation Between Two Corpora 6.2 Comparison Between Mandarin and English 6.2.1 Comparison at Conversation Level 6.2.2 Comparison at Turn Level 6.2.3 Comparison Among Different Gender Groups 6.3 Absolute Entrainment and Relative Entrainment 6.4 Summary of Comparison 6.5 Discussion Chapter 7 Conclusion 7.1 Major Findings 7.2 Limitations of this Research References Appendix ( A - L ) Afterwords