Prosodic interaction between speakers of American and British English.

Abstract

Previous work has found that interaction between speakers influences their production, in that phonetic similarity of the speakers to each other increases [Sancier and Fowler, J. Phonetics 25, 421–426 (1995); Pardo, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 2382–2393 (2006); and Tobin, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125, 2757 (2009)]. These studies have mostly focused on segmental properties of speech. Little is known, however, about how prosodic properties of speech are affected in conversational interaction. An experiment is presented that examines the interaction between native speakers of British English and American English. Using the synchronous speech paradigm [Cummins, ARLO 3, 7–11 (2002) and Zvonik and Cummins, in Proceedings of the Eurospeech 2003 (2003), pp. 777–780] where two speakers read sentences at the same time, we examine how speakers influence each other at the prosodic level. Eight subjects (4 dyads), each consisting of one British and one American speaker, read the following: a short story that contained four words where the two dialects differ in stress pattern, 13 target words where the dialects differ in vowels, and 84 sentences with varying intonation patterns (question, statement, and focus). The goal was to examine how speakers adjust to each other’s speech, and whether certain prosodic properties are more susceptible to adjustment to the co-speaker’s production than others.