Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English

Babel, Molly

doi:10.1017/s0047404510000400

Cited by 229 publications

(229 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

202

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Nonetheless, the fact that the participants imitated vowel length in some of the investigated words to a greater extent than in others suggests that imitation might have been linguistically-selective. If so, the obtained data supports the observations made by Babel (2009Babel ( , 2010 and Nielsen (2011) (see section 1).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…For instance, Babel (2009) observed that participants in her study imitated /ae/ and /ɑ/ to a greater extent than other investigated vowels. Analogously, the results of the study on NZE speakers (Babel, 2010) revealed that not all analysed vowels were imitated to the same extent. Nielsen (2011), on the other hand, discovered that lexical frequency had an effect on the degree of VOT imitation and that productions with reduced VOT were not imitated.…”

Section: Phonetic Imitationmentioning

confidence: 53%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Phonetic Imitation of Vowel Duration in L2 Speech

Zając

2013

RiL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reports the results of a pilot study concerned with phonetic imitation in the speech of Polish learners of English. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether native speakers of Polish imitate the length of English vowels and to determine whether the extent of phonetic imitation may be influenced by the model talker being a native or a non-native speaker of English. The participants were asked to perform an auditory naming task in which they indentified objects and actions presented on a set of photos twice, with and without the imitation task. The imitation task was further sub-divided depending on the model talker being a native or non-native speaker of English (a native Southern British English speaker and a native Polish speaker fluent in English). As the aim was to investigate the variability in durational characteristics of English vowels, the series of front vowels /æ e ɪ iː/ were analysed in the shortening and lengthening b_t vs. b_d contexts. The results of the study show that the participants imitated the length of the investigated vowels as a result of exposure to the two model talkers. The data suggest that the degree of imitation was mediated both by linguistic and social factors and that the direction of convergence might have been affected by the participants’ attitude toward L2 pronunciation.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Phonetic Imitationmentioning

confidence: 53%

Phonetic Imitation of Vowel Duration in L2 Speech

Zając

2013

RiL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Alongside previous work which indicates shifts in phonetic categories in vowels (Babel, 2010(Babel, , 2012 and stop consonants (Nielsen, 2011;Shockley et al, 2004) in imitation, the current research suggests that imitation also involves more global shifts in talker characteristics. These results also suggest, surprisingly, that prototypicality is more imitable.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

The effect of accommodation on perceived vocal aesthetics

McGuire¹,

Russell²,

Babel³

2013

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We conducted an auditory naming task (n=20) using eight model talker voices previously rated for attractiveness and prototypicality such that the Most Attractive, Least Attractive, Most Typical, and Least Typical voice for each gender served as a model talker. Female shadowers accommodated more than males, particularly to the Most Attractive Female model. This finding led us to question if in the course of accommodation to an attractive female voice, female shadowers themselves become more vocally attractive. We then conducted an AX task where listeners judged whether shadowers' baseline or shadowed productions were more attractive. We found that female voices were generally judged to be more attractive in shadowing conditions, regardless of the qualities of the model voice. In a follow-up experiment examining typicality, the shadowers' voices were used in a reaction time experiment where listeners categorized each voice as male or female. Following Strand (1999) more typical voices are those that elicit faster reaction times. Results of this experiment suggest that shadowers' voices, especially female ones, become more prototypical when shadowing typical voices and less so when shadowing atypical ones.

show abstract

“…Within the phonetic convergence literature (much of which is cited in this article), automatic imitation of perceived speech has been observed across studies employing diverse samples of models, shadowers, and conversational partners. In fact, many of these studies also employed test stimuli derived from a single model talker (e.g., Babel, 2010;Babel & Bulatov, 2012;Honorof, Weihing, & Fowler, 2011;Nielsen, 2011;Sanchez et al, 2010) and measured samples composed only of male (e.g., Pardo et al, 2012) or female (e.g., Delvaux & Soquet, 2007;Sanchez et al, 2010) participants. Still, future work should investigate whether the visual enhancement effects on auditory phonetic convergence observed here will generalize across different samples of talkers and perceivers.…”

Section: Lexical Characteristics Influence Phonetic Convergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Visibility of speech articulation enhances auditory phonetic convergence

Dias

Rosenblum

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Talkers automatically imitate aspects of perceived speech, a phenomenon known as phonetic convergence. Talkers have previously been found to converge to auditory and visual speech information. Furthermore, talkers converge more to the speech of a conversational partner who is seen and heard, relative to one who is just heard (Dias & Rosenblum Perception, 40, 1457-1466, 2011. A question raised by this finding is what visual information facilitates the enhancement effect. In the following experiments, we investigated the possible contributions of visible speech articulation to visual enhancement of phonetic convergence within the noninteractive context of a shadowing task. In Experiment 1, we examined the influence of the visibility of a talker on phonetic convergence when shadowing auditory speech either in the clear or in low-level auditory noise. The results suggest that visual speech can compensate for convergence that is reduced by auditory noise masking. Experiment 2 further established the visibility of articulatory mouth movements as being important to the visual enhancement of phonetic convergence. Furthermore, the word frequency and phonological neighborhood density characteristics of the words shadowed were found to significantly predict phonetic convergence in both experiments. Consistent with previous findings (e.g., Goldinger Psychological Review, 105, 251-279, 1998), phonetic convergence was greater when shadowing low-frequency words. Convergence was also found to be greater for low-density words, contrasting with previous predictions of the effect of phonological neighborhood density on auditory phonetic convergence (e.g., Pardo, Jordan, Mallari, Scanlon, & Lewandowski Journal of Memory and Language, 69, 183-195, 2013). Implications of the results for a gestural account of phonetic convergence are discussed.

show abstract

Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English

Cited by 229 publications

References 38 publications

Phonetic Imitation of Vowel Duration in L2 Speech

Phonetic Imitation of Vowel Duration in L2 Speech

The effect of accommodation on perceived vocal aesthetics

Visibility of speech articulation enhances auditory phonetic convergence

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About