The effect of talker image on phonetic convergence.

Abstract

This paper reports on an experiment that examines the socially motivated status of phonetic convergence. This is done by comparing social and asocial conditions in a lexical shadowing task. The social condition includes a photo of the talker while the asocial condition does not. The lexical shadowing task consists of the presentation of 50 low‐frequency monosyllabic words with the vowels /i ae a o u/ six times each. Participants are also recorded reading the word list in pretask and post‐task readings. Acoustic analyses are underway to identify differences in level of phonetic convergence in participants' productions in the two conditions (n = 20 in each condition) by comparing productions in the shadowing task to the pretask base line recordings. The results of this experiment contribute to the discussion regarding the status of phonetic convergence as a socially motivated process or a natural reflex that stems from the relationship between speech perception and speech production. This work has clear implications for theories of language change in addition to addressing issues regarding exemplar‐based theories of speech production, the relationship between speech perception and production, and the perception and encoding of talker‐specific characteristics.