Phonetic accommodation after passive exposure to native and nonnative speech

Abstract

We investigated native English talkers’ phonetic accommodation to a native or nonnative model talker in a passive auditory exposure setting. We performed a phonetic accommodation experiment, following the procedure of Goldinger & Azuma (2004). Specifically, the imitators read monosyllabic words, disyllabic words, and sentences before and after perceptual exposure to the stimuli. We found evidence of phonetic convergence both to native and nonnative model talkers from various acoustic measurements on words and sentences, and dynamic time warping analyses and XAB perception tests on sentences. We also found that dialect mismatch between participants and native model talkers inhibited phonetic convergence in some acoustic measurements. Additionally, the distances between model talkers and participants along the acoustic measurements before auditory exposure positively affected their degrees of phonetic convergence, regardless of the direction of the change; the farther the acoustic distance was before the auditory exposure, the larger the degree of phonetic convergence was. Moreover, the imitators generalized their accommodation patterns from exposed to unexposed items. Finally, XAB perception tests with the sentences revealed that imitators of all model talkers were perceived as converging towards their model talker, and importantly, this pattern of perceived accommodation was predicted by most of the sentence-based acoustic measurements.