Abstract
Phonetic imitation, also called phonetic convergence, is currently at the heart of numerous investigations since it can inform us on both the nature of lexical representations and the link between production and perception processes in spoken language communication. A task that has been largely used to study phonetic imitation is the shadowing task, in which participants merely listen to and repeat isolated words. In this study, we examined the extent to which the phonetic convergence effect found when participants shadow auditory tokens, is an imitation of the speaker. We thus compared the phonetic convergence effect observed in a shadowing task to that observed when participants were explicitly instructed to imitate the productions they were exposed to. Although the phonetic convergence effect was greater when participants intentionally imitated the speaker's productions, shadowing and imitation instructions led to the same degree of convergence in a post-exposure task. Hence, the convergence effect found in a shadowing task and that found in an imitation task seem to share a general mechanism which is automatic and which taps into the long-term representations of the words in memory. At a more theoretical level, our results reinforce the claim that detailed auditory traces associated with perceived words are stored in memory and are later used for production.
Highlights
Imitation is an all-pervading process by which individuals adjust to one another in social interaction, and is seen as one of the fundamental mechanisms of human development (Meltzoff et al, 2009)
We focused on the phonetic convergence effect found in the shadowing task and we compared it to that found in an imitation task in which participants were explicitly instructed to imitate the productions they were exposed to
GENERAL DISCUSSION In this study, we examined the extent to which the phonetic convergence effect found when participants shadow auditory tokens is an imitation of the speaker
Summary
Imitation is an all-pervading process by which individuals adjust to one another in social interaction, and is seen as one of the fundamental mechanisms of human development (Meltzoff et al, 2009). Vocal imitation plays an important role in language acquisition, and infants have been found to imitate speech patterns as early as 12 weeks after birth (Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1996). Called phonetic convergence, is the process by which a talker tends to make her/his speech more similar to that of the talker she/he is interacting with. This phenomenon is critical for models that assume a strong link between perception and production processes (Levelt, 1989) as well as for models that postulate that each word in the mental lexicon is associated with many auditory episodes (Goldinger, 1998). The observation that a talker becomes more similar in her/his production to a target talker as a result of exposure to that talker’s speech would indicate that detailed auditory traces associated with perceived words are stored in memory and are later used for production
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