Can mergers-in-progress be unmerged in speech accommodation?

Abstract

This study examines spontaneous phonetic accommodation of a dialect with distinct categories by speakers who are in the process of merging those categories. We focus on the merger of the NEAR and SQUARE lexical sets in New Zealand English, presenting New Zealand participants with an unmerged speaker of Australian English. Mergers-in-progress are a uniquely interesting sound change as they showcase the asymmetry between speech perception and production. Yet, we examine mergers using spontaneous phonetic imitation, which is phenomenon that is necessarily a behavior where perceptual input influences speech production. Phonetic imitation is quantified by a perceptual measure and an acoustic calculation of mergedness using a Pillai-Bartlett trace. The results from both analyses indicate spontaneous phonetic imitation is moderated by extra-linguistic factors such as the valence of assigned conditions and social bias. We also find evidence for a decrease in the degree of mergedness in post-exposure productions. Taken together, our results suggest that under the appropriate conditions New Zealanders phonetically accommodate to Australian English and that in the process of speech imitation, mergers-in-progress can, but do not consistently, become less merged.

Phonetic convergence across multiple measures and model talkers

“…As in Pardo, Jordan, et al (2013), the present study reveals that talkers do not imitate all acoustic-phonetic attributes in the same manner (see also Babel & Bulatov, 2012;Babel et al, 2013;Levitan & Hirschberg, 2011;Pardo et al, 2010;Pardo Gibbons, Suppes, & Krauss, 2012;Pardo, Cajori Jay, et al, 2013;Walker & Campbell-Kibler, 2015). No single attribute drives convergence, and talkers converge on some attributes at the same time that they diverge or fail to converge on others.…”

“…As summarized earlier, many explanations of phonetic convergence focus on its role in promoting social interaction by reducing social distance or increasing liking of a conversational partner. Although it is often useful to examine convergence in an individual acoustic parameter when assessing questions related to specific accents or attributes of sound change (e.g., Babel, 2010;Babel, McAuliffe, & Haber, 2013;Delvaux & Soquet, 2007;Dufour & Nguyen, 2013;Mitterer & Ernestus, 2008;Mitterer & Müsseler, 2013;Olmstead, Viswanathan, Aivar, & Manuel, 2013;Nguyen, Dufour, & Brunellière, 2012;Walker & Campbell-Kibler, 2015), assessments of a single acoustic attribute are limited with respect to broader interpretations of the phenomenon. For example, studies of convergence in VOT have often reported small changes toward a model's extended VOT values (usually around 10 ms or less; Fowler et al, 2003;Nielsen, 2011;Shockley, Sabadini, & Fowler, 2004;Yu, Abrego-Collier, & Sonderegger, 2013).…”

“…For example, studies have explored the impact of individual differences in talkers on their degrees of phonetic convergence (Aguilar et al, 2016;Postma-Nilsenová & Postma, 2013;Yu et al, 2013) and have related talker attitudes toward models to phonetic convergence (Abrego-Collier et al, 2011;Babel et al, 2013;Yu et al, 2013). A related and equally important consideration involves aspects of talkers who are the targets of convergence.…”

On the Origin of Post-Aspirated Stops: Production and Perception of /s/ + Voiceless Stop Sequences in Andalusian Spanish

“…In the case of Andalusian Spanish, the question is whether a speaker who realizes the contrast between /t/ and /st/ in production based on post-aspiration is also more sensitive to post-aspiration as a cue to the /t/-/st/ distinction in perception. However, empirical work on vowel mergers illustrates how perception and production can be misaligned, that is, how a perceived phonological contrast is by the same speaker merged in production (Babel et al, 2013;Labov et al, 1991). Further evidence against a direct production-perception link comes from studies on compensation for coarticulation (Grosvald & Corina, 2012;Kataoka, 2011) in which the degree between perceptual compensation for coarticulation and the production of coarticulation was not correlated within speakers.…”

Prosodic accommodation in Seoul Korean accentual phrases

“…Speech accommodation refers to a situation in which the speech patterns of interacting speakers become more similar, or converge, over the course of a conversation. In part because accommodation has been argued to be a vehicle for dialect acquisition and sound change ( [1], [2], [3]), it has received extensive investigation in recent years at various linguistic levels, including syntactic structure ( [4], [5], [6]), lexical items ( [7], [8], [9]), and phonetic features ( [10], [11]). The goal of this study is to investigate accommodation at the prosodic level, specifically prosodic boundaries, in order to gain a better understanding of the ways in which prosodic properties might be similarly malleable.…”