Phonetic convergence is linguistically and socially selective. The current study examined the constraints on this selectivity in convergence to Southern American English by non-Southern Americans in a word shadowing task. Participants were asked either to repeat the words after the model talker, to repeat the words after the model talker from Louisville, KY, or to imitate the way the model talker from Louisville, KY, said the words, in a between-subject design. Acoustic analysis of the participants' productions revealed significant phonetic convergence on word duration and back vowel fronting, but not on /aɪ/ monophthongization, across all three instruction conditions. These findings suggest social selectivity such that convergence on stereotyped variants is avoided, but convergence to a talker with a non-prestigious variety is not. A perceptual assessment of convergence confirmed the acoustic results, but also revealed significantly more convergence in the explicit imitation condition than in the two repetition conditions. These findings suggest that explicit instructions to imitate lead to greater convergence overall, but do not completely override social selectivity. A comparison of the acoustic and perceptual assessments of convergence indicates that they provide complementary insights into specific features and holistic patterns of convergence, respectively.
This exploratory study examined the simultaneous interactions and relative contributions of bottom-up social information (regional dialect, speaking style), top-down contextual information (semantic predictability), and the internal dynamics of the lexicon (neighborhood density, lexical frequency) to lexical access and word recognition. Cross-modal matching and intelligibility in noise tasks were conducted with a community sample of adults at a local science museum. Each task featured one condition in which keywords were presented in isolation and one condition in which they were presented within a multiword phrase. Lexical processing was slower and more accurate when keywords were presented in their phrasal context, and was both faster and more accurate for auditory stimuli produced in the local Midland dialect. In both tasks, interactions were observed among stimulus dialect, speaking style, semantic predictability, phonological neighborhood density, and lexical frequency. These interactions revealed that bottom-up social information and top-down contextual information contribute more to speech processing than the internal dynamics of the lexicon. Moreover, the relatively stronger bottom-up social effects were observed in both the isolated word and multiword phrase conditions, suggesting that social variation is central to speech processing, even in non-interactive laboratory tasks. At the same time, the specific interactions observed differed between the two experiments, reflecting task-specific demands related to processing time constraints and signal degradation.
This study investigates the impact of acoustic variability on speech processing using a cross-modal priming experiment. Participants heard an audio prime consisting of a single lexical item followed by a printed word on the computer screen and were asked to indicate whether or not the word they heard was the same as the word on the screen. Auditory primes were balanced for linguistic factors that contribute to phonetic reduction, including lexical neighborhood density and whether the token was the first or second mention of the word in the larger context from which it was extracted. Primes were also balanced for social factors which contribute to phonetic variation, including regional dialect. To analyze the effect of these factors on speech processing, reaction times to matching prime-target pairs were analyzed. The results show that reaction times for Midland listeners were significantly faster following Midland primes than Northern primes, suggesting a native dialect benefit. However, the effect of dialect was smaller for words with a lower neighborhood density and for second mention primes relative to first mention primes. Together, these results suggest that dialect variation may have a smaller impact on speech processing in contexts that favor phonetic reduction.
Listeners cope with between-talker phonetic variation by adapting their phonemic category boundaries based on evidence from individuals’ speech. The current project examined perceptual adaptation to dialect-based variation in the vowels /ɛ/ and /ʌ/, which have lower second formant (F2) frequencies in the Northern dialect of American English relative to the Midland dialect. In a forced-choice lexical identification task, participants identified auditory word tokens which contained vowels along an /ɛ/-/ʌ/ continuum. Words were presented in carrier sentences spoken by either a Northern or Midland talker, and phonemic category boundaries were estimated based on perception of the vowel continuum. Phonemic category boundaries occurred at lower F2s when stimulus words were presented in Northern sentences rather than Midland sentences, indicating perceptual adaptation consistent with the acoustic difference between the dialects. However, this effect was influenced by the phonetic content of the carrier sentence. Adaptation was only consistently found for carrier sentences that included natural tokens of /ɛ/ or /ʌ/, even though all carrier sentences included dialect-specific phonetic features. This suggests that participants were not sensitive to patterns of co-variation among vowels within the two dialects. Rather, they adapted their /ɛ/-/ʌ/ boundary for individual talkers only when provided with direct evidence for that boundary.
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