What is the default behavior in accommodation: Convergence or maintenance?

Abstract

This study, a secondary analysis of data from a phonetic accommodation study, considers the default behavior of speakers in accommodating to another speaker in an interaction. Should convergence or maintenance be considered the default behavior? There is inherent acoustic variation in our speech. Every time we produce a sound, such as a voiceless stop in English, it varies along some phonetic dimension, such as voice onset time (VOT). We might expect that, in the absence of any external influence, these voiceless stops will be realized with VOT longer than their overall mean 50% of the time and with VOT shorter than their overall mean 50% of the time. During interaction with another person, however, studies in social-psychology have suggested that lack of adjustment (maintenance) may be akin to divergence [Tong et al. (1999)]. In addition, convergence is a fairly robust finding in studies of accommodation and imitation [e.g., Nielsen (2011), Babel (2012)], suggesting that perhaps the default behavior in interaction is convergence. The purpose of this talk is to introduce these points of view, discuss the factors that may affect our interpretation, and facilitate discussion on this issue, which has implications for the growing body of research investigating accommodation.