Repeat what after whom? Exploring variable selectivity in a cross-dialectal shadowing task.

Abby Walker,Kathryn Campbell-Kibler

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00546

Abstract

Twenty women from Christchurch, New Zealand and 16 from Columbus Ohio (dialect region U.S. Midland) participated in a bimodal lexical naming task where they repeated monosyllabic words after four speakers from four regional dialects: New Zealand, Australia, U.S. Inland North and U.S. Midland. The resulting utterances were acoustically analyzed, and presented to listeners on Amazon Mechanical Turk in an AXB task. Convergence is observed, but differs depending on the dialect of the speaker, the dialect of the model, the particular word class being shadowed, and the order in which dialects are presented to participants. We argue that these patterns are generally consistent with findings that convergence is promoted by a large phonetic distance between shadower and model (Babel, 2010, contra Kim et al., 2011), and greater existing variability in a vowel class (Babel, 2012). The results also suggest that more comparisons of accommodation toward different dialects are warranted, and that the investigation of the socio-indexical meaning of specific linguistic forms in context is a promising avenue for understanding variable selectivity in convergence.

Highlights

A substantial body of work spanning multiple fields and at least four decades has documented the tendency for speakers to adjust their speech in relation to their interlocutors, most often by becoming more like them
For New Zealanders, we find that they converge to TRAP in general and American rhoticity, when the shadow the American models first
While the complicated results support previous claims that the phonetic distance of the vowel from the shadower’s own productions, the shadower’s phonetic repertoire matter, and saliency matter, they show that other factors must be at play, and that considering the social associations and context of particular variables may play a role even in these relatively reduced social circumstances

Summary

Introduction

A substantial body of work spanning multiple fields and at least four decades has documented the tendency for speakers to adjust their speech in relation to their interlocutors, most often by becoming more like them These effects have been shown to emerge in spontaneous, interactive speech (Natale, 1975; Gregory and Webster, 1996; Willemyns et al, 1997; Pardo, 2006), in speech tasks with elements of interaction (Giles et al, 1973; Natale, 1975) and in socially impoverished labbased shadowing tasks (Goldinger, 1998; Shockley et al, 2004; Babel, 2010). Linguistic production systems appear to be impacted directly by the perceptual process, causing productions to slightly increase resemblance of recently heard tokens, so that convergence is observed even absent clear interactional motivation

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Discussion

Conclusion