Phonetic accommodation of tone: Reversing a tone merger-in-progress via imitation

Production and perception across three Hong Kong Cantonese consonant mergers: Community- and individual-level perspectives

“…Attitudes can vary substantially, potentially influencing patterns of both production and perception. For example, although many participants characterized the mergers as 'incorrect' and 'lazy,' one young man expressed more neutral or positive sentiments, describing the pronunciations as 'more convenient' (see also Lin, Yao, & Luo, 2021 on both positive and negative attitudes about the younger generation's accent). Knowledge of the degree of stigmatization for each merger, along with individual attitudes towards the stigmatization, could help contextualize variation across individuals as well as any potential community-level reversals that are motivated by group orientation towards or away from the existing social meanings of the merger variants (see, e.g., Labov, Rosenfelder, & Fruehwald, 2013;Tamminga, 2019).…”

“…That is, differences may have arisen due to younger listeners perceiving the model speaker as a peer while older listeners perceived the same speaker as younger (Hay et al, 2006;Koops et al, 2008). Specifically, if there is an association between the younger generation and increased 'lazy pronunciation' held by older speakers (see discussion in Lin et al, 2021), we might expect that younger listeners (without such an association) perceive the stimuli more veridically while older listeners perceive the stimuli with less distinction. This possibility cannot be teased apart from other possible interpretations and must be left to future research.…”

Playing With Fire Compounds: The Tonal Accents of Compounds in (North) Norwegian Preschoolers’ Role-Play Register

“…The terms accommodation, shadowing, and imitation overlap in the literature, and all refer to ways in which speakers adapt their speech as an effect of spoken stimuli, either from an interlocutor or experimental stimuli. In phonetic accommodation and imitation, one of the variables that seems to influence whether a feature is imitated is the distance between the dialect of the imitator and the model speaker: the longer the distance (up until a certain point), the more imitation (Lin et al, 2021). D’Imperio and German (2015) find an effect of exposure to the shadowed variety in prosodic imitation of American English by Singapore English speakers.…”

“…There is also a discussion to be had of whether imitation is constrained by the phonological contrasts in the speakers’ first language, but the results here are mixed (Braun et al, 2006; D’Imperio et al, 2014, 2015; German, 2012). Interestingly, metalinguistic awareness of the feature in question does not seem to be a necessary condition for imitation to happen (Lin et al, 2021). Furthermore, Petrone et al (2021) found that “speakers with higher working memory capacities were more accurate in phonological imitation” (p. 1), whereas no such effect was found for phonetic imitation.…”

The effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on incomplete tonal neutralization

“…Compared with the body of quantitative studies on segmental voicing neutralization in a wide range of (Indo-European) languages, much less research has focused on neutralization at the suprasegmental level, such as lexical tones. A handful of studies have investigated lexical tonal neutralization in Cantonese (e.g., Bauer et al, 2003 ; Mok et al, 2013 ; Cheng, 2017 ; Liang, 2018 ; Lin et al, 2021 ). A number of studies have investigated the status of tonal contrast between two merging tonal pairs.…”