Final stop accommodation in married couples.

Abstract

This study investigates convergence between married couples to determine if there are patterns of convergence and if that convergence can be attributed to social indexing or speaker accommodation. Preliminary work done with sociolinguistic interviews of residents of Harkers Island, NC demonstrated that the release of the final stop consonant /t/ has social meaning: Those residents who most identified with island life deleted or failed to release their final /t/ in casual speech, and female speakers were much more likely to release final /t/ than male speakers in their cohort. The two married couples examined in the Harkers Island data revealed two separate patterns of accommodation. One couple exhibited convergence that mirrored the male, island identifying spectrum where his percentage of stop release was 5.4% and hers was 0%. The other couple exhibited convergence that mirrored the female /t/ release spectrum with her percentage of stop release of 29.6% and his of 30%. These preliminary results suggest that not only is there phonetic accommodation between spouses, but also that this accommodation is not mutual convergence. It is hypothesized that patterns of phonetic convergence will emerge, and that these patterns will fall along the continuum of social indexing in the larger community.