Effects of native language and habituation in phonetic accommodation

Abstract

Effects of vocal accommodation have been reported in a wide range of contexts, but they have typically been small. The absence of effects in some cases has proven perplexing. In the present investigation I present innovative methods for the representation of phonetic distance between phonetic tokens and the analysis of phonetic accommodation. I take a broad crosslinguistic perspective and report effects of linguistic background (L1) on patterns of phonetic convergence toward typical monolingual English voiceless stop voice-onset-times (VOTs).I propose that patterns of accommodation in laryngeal-oral coordination, as instantiated by voiceless stop VOTs, will reflect general principles of motor coordination (preferences for stable/in-phase coordination, cf. Browman & Goldstein, 1988; Haken, Kelso, & Bunz, 1985). Thus, stable, near-zero VOTs (cf. Spanish) will be less likely to show convergence toward intermediate English VOT, whereas less stable, long VOTs (cf. Korean) will be more likely to converge. Monolingual English and bilingual (Korean-English, Spanish-English) participants completed word shadowing and reading tasks. Their vowel-normalized voiceless stop VOTs were submitted to two analyses which confirm the articulatory stability hypothesis and reveal group-specific changes in vocal accommodation over time. The first involves a general baseline-to-test comparison, while in the second, a trial-specific difference from baseline is used as a dependent measure.The results offer new insights into the effects of language background on vocal accommodation, and the analytical approach offers a means to more cleanly isolate subtle effects of accommodation in speech among a multitude of competing factors.