Individual variability and the effect of personality on non-native speech shadowing

The present study examines whether personality traits are predictive of success in non-native speech shadowing. Seventy-four monolingual native speakers of English shadowed French words containing high rounded vowels /y/ and /u/ produced by a native French model talker and provided information about their personality through a Big Five Inventory questionnaire. Acoustic analyses support the idea that some personality traits predicted the degree of similarity between the talkers and the model. In this case, shadowed productions by talkers who had higher scores in extraversion and neuroticism were significantly more similar to the model than those who had lower scores.