A comparison of phonetic convergence in conversational interaction and speech shadowing

Natural Leaders: Some interlocutors elicit greater convergence across conversations and across characteristics

“…However, few convergence studies include re-testing to demonstrate that individuals are consistent in these differences, and the size of the effect is often small. There is some evidence for individual tendencies in convergence within a given characteristic between instances of same task or similar tasks (Tamminga et al, 2018;Sanker, 2015), but evidence for tendencies across different tasks is weaker (Pardo et al, 2018). The results of our study, in which each individual conversed with several different interlocutors on different topics, provide little evidence for individual tendencies in convergence.…”

“…Thus, effects should be consistent across tasks, and different phonetic characteristics should exhibit the same influences, though lexical and syntactic characteristics might behave differently. Pardo et al (2018) argue that such a perception-production link cannot be automatic, because it varies based on context, resulting in different convergence behavior of the same speaker in different tasks.…”

“…Many studies implicitly or explicitly assume that variation in convergence reflects characteristics of individuals, but only a few studies have tested the same individuals in multiple conversations or experimental tasks. Individuals do exhibit some consistent tendencies in convergence in the same or very similar tasks, when measured in the same characteristic (Sanker, 2015;Tamminga et al, 2018), but these tendencies are much weaker across more dissimilar tasks such as shadowing and conversation (Pardo et al, 2018). In conversations, tendencies of an individual in producing convergence cannot be distinguished from tendencies of an individual to elicit convergence, which could confound the results when each speaker participates in a single conversation.…”

“…These results suggest that individual differences in convergence by speaker and by interlocutor, if they exist, are too weak to be reliably detected by the method used here. Recent work has generally also found a lack of consistency in the degree of convergence exhibited by individual speakers across tasks (Pardo et al, 2018) or in different conversations (Cohen Priva & Sanker, 2018), though they exhibit some consistency within a characteristic in the same task (e.g. Tamminga et al, 2018).…”

“…This variation is sometimes attributed to individual differences in tendency to converge, which could indicate a broad cognitive trait producing these differences, but little work has tested whether tendencies are consistent for an individual across characteristics or across tasks. The existence of individual differences in convergence is called into question by several studies that have looked for individual consistency but found weak evidence or no evidence (Pardo et al, 2012;Sanker, 2015;Weise & Levitan, 2018;Pardo et al, 2018). Less work has addressed differences in the degree of convergence elicited by particular interlocutors.…”