Phonetic Convergence, Language Talent, Personality and Attention

Natalie Lewandowski,Matthias Jilka

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2019.00018

Natalie Lewandowski, Matthias Jilka

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00018

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Abstract

Studies into phonetic adaptation rarely consider individual differences (IDs) on a cognitive and personality level between speakers as a direct source of adaptation variation. In order to investigate the degree to which the individual phonetic talent and further psycho-cognitive IDs of speakers affects phonetic convergence in a second language setting, 20 German native speakers were involved in two dialog tasks with two native speakers of English, a male speaker of American English and a female speaker of Standard Southern British English. The dialogs were quasi-spontaneous task-oriented interactions elicited with the Diapix picture-matching game. The English L2 learners were divided into a phonetically talented and less talented group based on their test results and evaluation in a preceding extensive language talent test battery. The acoustic analyses using amplitude envelopes revealed that talented speakers converged significantly more towards their English native speaking partners in the Diapix study. An additional analysis relates their degree of convergence to a range of personality and cognitive measures. The factors openness, neuroticism, Behavior Inhibition score and the switch costs in a Simon Test were significantly impacting the degree of phonetic convergence in the dialog study.

Highlights

Adult language learners vary greatly in the quality and speed of acquiring the sound system of a second language
Phonetic convergence arising in fully natural contexts—in interactive, dynamically evolving dialogs— could be even further away from the effects we find in imitation studies, e.g., in shadowing
The analysis of the convergence effects of the German speakers in the current study does not follow Lewandowski (2012) but has been completely re-calculated employing linear mixed effects modeling. This allowed the inclusion of by-speaker and bypartner random intercepts and slopes, which are extremely useful for handling datasets heavily loaded with individual differences and, at the same time, rather small effect sizes to be expected, which are most often found in research into phonetic adaptation

Summary

Introduction

Adult language learners vary greatly in the quality and speed of acquiring the sound system of a second language (i.e., all segmental and prosodic manifestations on both the phonetic and phonological level). The clearest manifestation of such individual learner characteristics is the assumption of language or rather pronunciation learning abilities inherent to the speaker, i.e., phonetic talent or aptitude. The described perception-production loop is what characterizes the phenomenon of phonetic convergence, or phonetic adaptation, within a conversational situation—where two talkers become more alike in their pronunciation in the course of a dialog (Pardo, 2006). It may be the case that speakers being especially good at converging to their speaking partner during a conversation, become very good at acquiring

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