Phonetic convergence in an immersive game-based task

Abstract

Phonetic convergence occurs when talkers change the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of their speech to be more similar to a conversational partner. It is typically studied using laboratory tasks, but the extent to which talkers converge varies considerably across studies. One aspect of these tasks that differs from real-world settings is how engaging they are. Highly contrived tasks may fail to elicit natural speech production, which could influence whether or not talkers converge. We address this issue by comparing the extent to which interlocutors converge in a repetitive, unengaging task versus an immersive video game-based task. Both tasks were designed to elicit production of specific words. Thirty word-initial voicing minimal pairs were used as stimuli, and we measured the degree to which phonetic cues (e.g., voice onset time; VOT) changed over the course of the experiment. For the more engaging task, participants’ VOT values for voiceless tokens trended towards convergence (i.e., they gradually shifted their VOTs to be more similar to their partner’s speech). In contrast, we found no clear evidence for convergence in the less engaging task. These results suggest that engaging, naturalistic tasks may yield results that more accurately reflect real-world conversational speech and phonetic variation than traditional laboratory experiments.