The role of native phonology in spontaneous imitation: Evidence from Seoul Korean

Abstract

This study investigates the role of phonology in spontaneous imitation in Seoul Korean speakers' imitation of aspirated stops by comparing the primary and non-primary cues. Seoul Korean aspirated stops are differentiated from stops of other phonation types by at least two distinct acoustic properties, stop VOT and f0 of the post-stop vowel, with the latter being the primary cue. In the imitation experiment, Seoul Korean speakers heard and shadowed model speech that contained aspirated stops manipulated by either raising post-stop f0 or lengthening VOT. Their realization of these properties in /tʰ/, /t/, and /t*/ productions were compared before, during, and after exposure. Although both high f0 and long VOT induced imitative changes in post-shadowing productions, the results revealed that exposure to an enhanced non-primary cue (long VOT) also influences the production of the primary cue for aspirated stops (post-stop f0). However, an enhanced primary cue (high f0) does not have similar effects on the non-primary cue. These results provide evidence that spontaneous imitation is not strictly tied to individual phonetic properties but it is rather phonological in that abstract categories are involved in the process of imitation.Kwon: The role of native phonology in spontaneous imitation Art. 10, page 2 of 24 in direct opposition to each other, but they focus on different aspects of spontaneous imitation. While the exemplar account claims that the nature of the memory system gives rise to observed patterns of imitation with regard to the effects of lexical frequency, recency, and amount of exposure, the direct realist account claims that the intrinsic link between speech perception and production at the articulatory level explains the rapid and direct imitation.Many researchers have investigated the role of various social factors in spontaneous imitation, and reported that non-grammatical or social factors, such as gender, conversational role, or attractiveness of the model speaker influence both the likelihood of imitation (i.e., whether the model speech is imitated in the subsequent productions or not) and the imitation fidelity (i.e., how similar the subsequent production becomes to the model speech) (e.g., Pardo, 2006;Babel, 2012;Babel, McGuire, Walters, & Nicholls, 2014). While these social aspects of imitation are an intriguing topic that has been intensively explored, the present study focuses on the role of phonology in imitation and asks the following question: When speakers converge to a model speaker, that is, when the imitation is triggered, how does the imitators' phonological knowledge influence the pattern of imitation (i.e., how the model is imitated), as well as the likelihood and the degree of imitation?Previous research on the role of phonology in spontaneous imitation have suggested that changes in certain phonetic properties are not imitated when they are detrimental to phonological contrast or phonologically irrelevant. For example, Nielsen (2011) reports that English speakers imitate lengthene...

The effect of orthography in Mandarin speakers’ production of English voiceless stops

“…Mitterer and Ernestus, 2008; Nielsen, 2011). Phonetic cues are imitated differently according to their relevance in one’s native phonological system (Kim and Clayards, 2019; Kwon, 2019; Lu and Lee-Kim, 2021). Since Mandarin Chinese contrasts aspiration, and the average VOTs of aspirated and unaspirated stops fall well within the range of those in English (Table 4), we expect that VOT cues related to unaspirated and aspirated stops will be successfully imitated by Mandarin speakers.…”