Phonetic convergence in temporal organization during shadowed speech

Abstract

The goal of this study was to examine phonetic convergence in temporal organization across regional dialects of American English in a sentence shadowing task. Participants from the Northern and Midland American English dialect regions, as well as Mobile participants, who had lived in multiple dialect regions, were asked to read a set of sentences to establish a baseline of temporal organization, and then to repeat the same set of sentences after Northern, Midland, and Southern model talkers. Measures of speaking rate (i.e., sentence duration) and temporal organization (i.e., %V, ΔC, ΔV, rPVI-C, and nPVI-V) were calculated for the baseline sentences, shadowed sentences, and model talker sentences. Statistical analysis of the differences in the phonetic distance between the model talkers’ utterances and the shadowers’ read and shadowed utterances, respectively, revealed significant convergence in speaking rate and ΔV, across all shadower groups and all model talker dialects. These results are consistent with general processes of rhythmic entrainment that are observed across physical and biological systems.