Following research that found imitation in single-word shadowing, this study examines the degree to which interacting talkers increase similarity in phonetic repertoire during conversational interaction. Between-talker repetitions of the same lexical items produced in a conversational task were examined for phonetic convergence by asking a separate set of listeners to detect similarity in pronunciation across items in a perceptual task. In general, a listener judged a repeated item spoken by one talker in the task to be more similar to a sample production spoken by the talker's partner than corresponding pre- and postinteraction utterances. Both the role of a participant in the task and the sex of the pair of talkers affected the degree of convergence. These results suggest that talkers in conversational settings are susceptible to phonetic convergence, which can mark nonlinguistic functions in social discourse and can form the basis for phenomena such as accent change and dialect formation.

How does a perceiver resolve the linguistic properties of an utterance? This question has motivated many investigations within the study of speech perception and a great variety of explanations. In a retrospective summary 15 years ago, Klatt (1989) reviewed a large sample of theoretical descriptions of the perceiver's ability to project the sensory effects of speech, exhibiting inexhaustible variety, into a finite and small number of linguistically defined attributes, whether features, phones, phonemes, syllables, or words. Although he noted many distinctions among the accounts, with few exceptions they exhibited a common feature. Each presumed that perception begins with a speech signal, well-composed and fit to analyze. This common premise shared by otherwise divergent explanations of perception obliges the models to admit severe and unintended constraints on their applicability. To exist within the limits set by this simplifying assumption, the models are restricted to a domain in which speech is the only sound; moreover, only a single talker ever speaks at once. Although this designation is easily met in laboratory samples, it is safe to say that it is rare in vivo. Moreover, in their exclusive devotion to the perception of speech the models are tacitly modular (Fodor, 1983), whether or not they acknowledge it.Despite the consequences of this dedication of perceptual models to speech and speech alone, there has been a plausible and convenient way to persist in invoking the simplifying assumption. This fundamental premise survives intact if a preliminary process of perceptual organization finds a speech signal, follows its patterned variation amid the effects of other sound sources, and delivers it whole and ready to analyze for linguistic properties. The indifference to the conditions imposed by the common perspective reflects an apparent consensus that perceptual organization of speech is simple, automatic, and accomplished by generic means. However, despite the rapidly established perceptual coherence of the constituents of a speech signal, the perceptual organization of speech cannot be reduced to the available and well-established principles of auditory perceptual organization.

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This study consolidates findings on phonetic convergence in a large-scale examination of the impacts of talker sex, word frequency, and model talkers on multiple measures of convergence. A survey of nearly three dozen published reports revealed that most shadowing studies used very few model talkers and did not assess whether phonetic convergence varied across same-and mixed-sex pairings. Furthermore, some studies have reported effects of talker sex or word frequency on phonetic convergence, but others have failed to replicate these effects or have reported opposing patterns. In the present study, a set of 92 talkers (47 female) shadowed either same-sex or opposite-sex models (12 talkers, six female). Phonetic convergence was assessed in a holistic AXB perceptual-similarity task and in acoustic measures of duration, F0, F1, F2, and the F1 × F2 vowel space. Across these measures, convergence was subtle, variable, and inconsistent. There were no reliable main effects of talker sex or word frequency on any measures. However, female shadowers were more susceptible to lexical properties than were males, and model talkers elicited varying degrees of phonetic convergence. Mixed-effects regression models confirmed the complex relationships between acoustic and holistic perceptual measures of phonetic convergence. In order to draw broad conclusions about phonetic convergence, studies should employ multiple models and shadowers (both male and female), balanced multisyllabic items, and holistic measures. As a potential mechanism for sound change, phonetic convergence reflects complexities in speech perception and production that warrant elaboration of the underspecified components of current accounts.

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