Spontaneous Phonetic Imitation Across Regional Dialects

Speakers subconsciously alter their pronunciation towards that of their conversation partner through a process called spontaneous phonetic imitation. Previous research has shown that this imitation may not be a completely automatic process. One factor that may influence the extent of imitation is social biases based on gender, age, or region. The current study used a lexical shadowing task to determine if speakers would spontaneously imitate American English vowel variants that were not found in their native dialect. Results showed that in the non-interactive task, regionally distinct vowels were significantly imitated. Furthermore, the level of imitation was not related to previous familiarity or experience with the dialect in question

Contributions of social, contextual, and lexical factors in speech processing

This project examines the individual and combined effects of social, contextual, and lexical factors on speech processing. The results of the project are reported in: Dossey, E., Jones, Z., & Clopper, C. G. (2023). Relative contributions of social, contextual, and lexical factors in speech processing. Language and Speech, 66, 322-353. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00238309221107870. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1056409)