Evidence for phonetic and social selectivity in spontaneous phonetic imitation

Spontaneous phonetic imitation is the process by which a talker comes to be more similar-sounding to a model talker as the result of exposure. The current experiment investigates this phenomenon, examining whether vowel spectra are automatically imitated in a lexical shadowing task and how social liking affects imitation. Participants were assigned to either a Black talker or White talker; within this talker manipulation, participants were either put into a condition with a digital image of their assigned model talker or one without an image. Liking was measured through attractiveness rating. Participants accommodated toward vowels selectively; the low vowels /æ ɑ/ showed the strongest effects of imitation compared to the vowels /i o u/, but the degree of this trend varied across conditions. In addition to these findings of phonetic selectivity, the degree to which these vowels were imitated was subtly affected by attractiveness ratings and this also interacted with the experimental condition. The results demonstrate the labile nature of linguistic segments with respect to both their perceptual encoding and their variation in production.

► Social factors such as liking and dialect influence the degree of spontaneous phonetic imitation.
► Phonetic knowledge is labile with respect to both perception and production.
► Auditory exposure influence subsequent production.