Perspectives on the motivations for phonetic convergence

Coles-Harris, Evan Hugh

doi:10.1111/lnc3.12268

Cited by 18 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…Spontaneously occurring linguistic accommodation among interactants in on-line situations is a widely studied phenomenon-see e.g., Coles-Harris (2017); Gessinger et al (2019); Hume and Mailhot (2013) for the phonetic level, often also referred to as convergence or alignment in interaction (see Garrod et al (2018) for an overview) including discussion of rational communication effects (e.g., Pickering and Garrod (2004)). Here, we come from a diachronic perspective and look at possible long-term effects of interaction within a linguistic community, which we refer to as CONVENTIONALIZATION.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

et al. 2021

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We present empirical evidence of the communicative utility of conventionalization, i.e., convergence in linguistic usage over time, and diversification, i.e., linguistic items acquiring different, more specific usages/meanings. From a diachronic perspective, conventionalization plays a crucial role in language change as a condition for innovation and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010; Schmid, 2015) and diversification is a cornerstone in the formation of sublanguages/registers, i.e., functional linguistic varieties (Halliday, 1988; Harris, 1991). While it is widely acknowledged that change in language use is primarily socio-culturally determined pushing towards greater linguistic expressivity, we here highlight the limiting function of communicative factors on diachronic linguistic variation showing that conventionalization and diversification are associated with a reduction of linguistic variability. To be able to observe effects of linguistic variability reduction, we first need a well-defined notion of choice in context. Linguistically, this implies the paradigmatic axis of linguistic organization, i.e., the sets of linguistic options available in a given or similar syntagmatic contexts. Here, we draw on word embeddings, weakly neural distributional language models that have recently been employed to model lexical-semantic change and allow us to approximate the notion of paradigm by neighbourhood in vector space. Second, we need to capture changes in paradigmatic variability, i.e. reduction/expansion of linguistic options in a given context. As a formal index of paradigmatic variability we use entropy, which measures the contribution of linguistic units (e.g., words) in predicting linguistic choice in bits of information. Using entropy provides us with a link to a communicative interpretation, as it is a well-established measure of communicative efficiency with implications for cognitive processing (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016; Venhuizen et al., 2019); also, entropy is negatively correlated with distance in (word embedding) spaces which in turn shows cognitive reflexes in certain language processing tasks (Mitchel et al., 2008; Auguste et al., 2017). In terms of domain we focus on science, looking at the diachronic development of scientific English from the 17th century to modern time. This provides us with a fairly constrained yet dynamic domain of discourse that has witnessed a powerful systematization throughout the centuries and developed specific linguistic conventions geared towards efficient communication. Overall, our study confirms the assumed trends of conventionalization and diversification shown by diachronically decreasing entropy, interspersed with local, temporary entropy highs pointing to phases of linguistic expansion pertaining primarily to introduction of new technical terminology.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

et al. 2021

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“…SDA could be incremental in terms of number of acts of convergence, but also size of the acts of convergence, at least for non-discrete features like vowel quality. This would further bridge the gap between exemplar- and accommodation-based explanations of SDA, which are in any case more complementary than contradictory ( Coles-Harris, 2017 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typically, in studies on phonetic convergence, speakers interact in a lab setting and the degree to which the phonetic properties of their speech change as a result of this short-term interaction is investigated (e.g., Pardo, 2006 ). Since these studies focus on speech recorded throughout the experiment, any shift from a speaker’s baseline can be tracked, and (un)expected shifts have indeed been tracked (see Coles-Harris, 2017 for a review). They also suggest that the necessity for a feature to be salient to trigger convergence is not as absolute as previously thought: convergence toward non- or less salient features ( Babel, 2010 ; Delvaux & Soquet, 2007 ; MacLeod, 2014 ; Pardo et al, 2012 ) and even divergence from salient features ( MacLeod, 2014 ) have been documented.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Features of a second dialect are acquired because they have been frequently and recently heard, and because they are relevant to the situation. Accommodation and exemplar theories are compatible to a certain extent ( Coles-Harris, 2017 ), that is, they are both adequate to explain large phonetic shifts motivated by indexical factors, but exemplar-based models predict and account for much finer shifts than accommodation theories. If our results reveal small phonetic shifts, this would not necessarily provide evidence against accommodation theories, but would support exemplar-based models.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Using Mahalanobis Distances to Investigate Second Dialect Acquisition: A Study on Quebec French

2022

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Second dialect acquisition (SDA) can be defined as the process through which geographically mobile individuals adapt to new dialect features of their first language. Two common methodological approaches in SDA studies could lead to underestimating the phonetic changes that mobile speakers may experience: only large phonetic differences between dialects are considered, and external sources are used to infer what should have been the speakers’ original dialect. By contrast, in this study, we carry out a longitudinal analysis to empirically assess the speakers’ baseline and shift away from it with no priors as to which features should change or not. Furthermore, we focus on Quebec French, a variety with a relatively crowded vowel space. Using Mahalanobis distances, we measure how acoustic characteristics of vowels produced by 15 mobile speakers change relative to those of a control group of 8 sedentary speakers, with the mobile participants recorded right after they moved to Quebec City, then a year later. Overall, the results show a reduction of Mahalanobis distances over time, indicating convergence toward the control system. Convergence also tends to be greater in denser areas of the vowel space. These results suggest that phonetic changes during SDA could be finer than previously thought. This study calls for the use of methodological approaches that can reveal such trends, and contributes to uncovering the extent of phonetic flexibility during adulthood.

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“…Given these capabilities and a model of speech processing including a direct perception-production link (e.g., Goldinger, 1998;Pickering & Garrod, 2013), implicit phonetic convergence can, in principle, occur as an automatic consequence of the interaction between incoming speech and the listeners' representations (though there is strong evidence that mediating factors play a role, even in implicit convergence; see Coles-Harris 2017 for discussion). 1 On the other hand, explicit imitation also requires additional, controlled 1 While the details of the cognitive architecture of phonetic convergence are far from established, there is good evidence that it involves automatic processes resulting from the interaction of the perception and production systems, but that it is also mediated by other factors (Coles-Harris, 2017). In this work, for simplicity, we use automatic to refer to the set of processes resulting in implicit phonetic convergence, in contrast to the controlled factors we lay out as necessary to explicit imitation.…”

Section: The Cognitive Architecture Of Explicit Imitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underpinnings of explicit phonetic imitation: perception, production, and variability

Schertz¹,

Adil²,

Kravchuk³

2023

Glossa Psycholinguistics

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This work tests the relative role of perception- and production-based predictors, and the relationship between them, in imitation of artificial accents varying in voice onset time (VOT), using a paradigm designed to target distinct sub-processes of imitation. We examined how explicit imitation of sentences differing systematically in voice onset time (VOT) was influenced by the type of VOT manipulation (lengthened vs. shortened) and by the presence vs. absence of voice-related variability in exposure. In contrast to previous work, participants imitated shortened as well as lengthened VOT, albeit with both qualitative and quantitative differences across the two manipulation types. The presence of voice-related variability inhibited imitation, but this inhibition was mitigated by a preceding session with no voice-related variability (i.e., sentences were acoustically identical except for VOT). We then tested the extent to which individual performance on the accent imitation task was related to performance on three other tasks: 1) discrimination of the target accents, 2) imitation of words in isolation drawn from a VOT continuum, and 3) discrimination of these same words. Performance on the accent discrimination task and the word-level imitation task, but not the word-level discrimination task, were independently predictive of accent imitation. Results are consistent with a conceptualization of explicit imitation as the sum of automatic phonetic convergence processes overlaid with distinct, controlled perceptual and articulatory factors that pattern differently across individuals. Phonetic imitation should not be considered as a monolithic skill, and models predicting variation in imitative ability must consider not only the potential sources of individual variability, but also at what level these sources of variability exert their influence. 

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Perspectives on the motivations for phonetic convergence

Cited by 18 publications

References 76 publications

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

Less is More/More Diverse: On The Communicative Utility of Linguistic Conventionalization

Using Mahalanobis Distances to Investigate Second Dialect Acquisition: A Study on Quebec French

Underpinnings of explicit phonetic imitation: perception, production, and variability

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