Repeat what after whom? Exploring variable selectivity in a cross-dialectal shadowing task.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Phonetics

Background:

• Speech accommodation, or convergence, is a subconscious process where individuals adapt their speech patterns to match those of their conversational partners.
• Understanding the factors influencing speech convergence is crucial for comprehending language variation and change.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how speakers from different dialect regions (New Zealand and U.S. Midland) exhibit phonetic convergence when shadowing words produced by speakers of various regional dialects (New Zealand, Australian, U.S. Inland North, U.S. Midland).
• To analyze the acoustic properties of speech convergence and identify patterns related to speaker and model dialect, word class, and presentation order.

Main Methods:

• Participants (20 from New Zealand, 16 from U.S. Midland) performed a bimodal lexical naming task, repeating monosyllabic words after four regional dialect speakers.
• Acoustic analysis of the repeated utterances was conducted.
• Listener judgments were collected using an AXB task on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Main Results:

• Speech convergence was observed, but the extent and nature of this convergence varied significantly.
• Convergence patterns were influenced by the interplay between the speaker's dialect, the model's dialect, the specific vowel class being shadowed, and the sequential presentation of dialects.
• Results align with theories suggesting convergence is promoted by greater phonetic distance and higher existing variability within a vowel class.

Conclusions:

• Speech convergence is a complex phenomenon influenced by multiple linguistic and contextual factors.
• Further research comparing accommodation across diverse dialects is warranted.
• Investigating the socio-indexical meanings of linguistic forms offers a promising avenue for understanding selective accommodation patterns.