Selective Vowel Imitation in Spontaneous Phonetic Accommodation

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2009) Selective vowel imitation in spontaneous phonetic accommodation Molly Babel Department of Linguistics University of British Columbia and University of California, Berkeley I. INTRODUCTION As people learn to speak, they acquire the language and dialect spoken around them. Sentence structure, lexical selection, and pronunciation are all determined by the patterns used in the ambient language. With respect to pronunciation, this pattern of sounding like those in our immediate environment continues throughout the lifespan through the process of spontaneous phonetic imitation (Goldinger, 1998). This is the phenomenon in which a talker acquires the acoustic characteristics of an interlocutor through the course of verbal interaction. Spontaneous phonetic imitation is important, since it may account for a wide range of phenomena such as historical sound change and dialect acquisition. Moreover, the cognitive mechanisms that motivate spontaneous imitation are pervasive from infancy (Kuhl and Metzloff, 1996) and existent across non- linguistic behaviors like foot shaking and face touching (Dijksterhuis and Bargh, 2001). In terms of speech, the cognitive mechanisms that prompt actions that are taken in by the perceptual field are of great importance for theories of speech perception and production, crucially for theories that propose a strong link between the two faculties (e.g., Goldstein and Fowler, 2003). Phonetic imitation, also known as phonetic convergence or phonetic accommodation, has implications for variability in language representation as well. The fact that the perceptual categories of language are labile is well grounded (Norris et al., 2003; Kraljic and Samuel, 2005, 2006, 2007; Kraljic et al., 2008a,b; Maye et al., 2008).