The Reliability of Individual Differences in VOT Imitation

Wade, Lacey; Lai, Wei Kuang; Tamminga, Meredith

doi:10.1177/0023830920947769

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…In spite of the theoretical value of capturing such tendencies in pronunciation data, that emphasis appears to be at odds both with common anecdotal reports and with longitudinal data (Munro et al, 2015) indicating large inter-learner differences in pronunciation learning trajectories. Recent work by Wade et al (2020) illustrates how an excessive focus on group means "masks the complexity of phonetic behaviors." Their native English VOT data showed that individual departures from group performance were often stable, indicating that between-speaker variability was not simply "noise, " but reflected systematic individual differences from group norms that were not explicable on linguistic or sociolinguistic grounds.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition

Munro

2021

Front. Commun.

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Hierarchies of difficulty in second-language (L2) phonology have long played a role in the postulation and evaluation of learning models. In L2 pronunciation teaching, hierarchies are assumed to be helpful in the development of instructional strategies based on anticipated areas of difficulty. This investigation addressed the practicality of defining a pedagogically useful hierarchy of difficulty for English tense and lax close vowels (/i I u ʊ/) produced by Cantonese speakers. Unlike their English counterparts, Cantonese close tense-lax pairs are allophonic variants with [i u] occurring before alveolars and [I ʊ] before velars. Each tense-lax pair represents a “phonemic split” in which members of a single L1 category are realized contrastively in L2. Despite evidence that English tense-lax distinctions are challenging for Cantonese speakers, no previous empirical work has closely considered the problem from the standpoint of vowel intelligibility across multiple phonetic contexts and in different words sharing the same rhyme. In a picture-based word-elicitation task, 18 Cantonese-speaking participants produced 31 high-frequency CV and CVC words. Vowels were evaluated for intelligibility by phonetically-trained judges. A series of mixed-effects binary logistic models were fitted to the scores, with vowel quality, phonetic context (rhyme) and word as factors, and length of Canadian residence and daily use of English as co-variates. As expected, the general hierarchy of difficulty for vowels that emerged (/i/ > /u/ > /ʊ/ > /I/) was complicated by large differences across phonetic contexts. Results were not readily explicable in terms of transfer; moreover, different words with the same rhyme were not produced with equal intelligibility. The most serious modeling complication was the sizeable inter-speaker variability in difficulties, which could not be accounted for by model co-variates. Although some difficulties were roughly systematic at the group level, it is argued that establishing a pedagogically useful hierarchy on such data would prove intractable. Rather, L2 learners might be better served by assessment and instructional targeting of their individual problem areas than by a focus on errors predicted from hierarchies of difficulty.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition

Munro

2021

Front. Commun.

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“…However, few convergence studies include retesting 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 linguistic characteristic between instances of same task or similar tasks (Sanker, 2015; Wade et al, n.d.), 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.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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 linguistic characteristic in the same task (e.g., Wade et al, n.d.). Pardo et al (2017) found that some model talkers consistently elicited more convergence than others in the same shadowing task with the same recordings.…”

Section: Methods Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many studies implicitly or explicitly assume that variation in convergence reflects traits of individuals, but only a few studies have tested the same individuals in multiple conversations or experimental tasks. There is some evidence that individuals have consistent tendencies in convergence in the same or very similar tasks, when measured in the same linguistic characteristic (Sanker, 2015; Wade, Lai, & Tamminga, n.d.), 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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Natural Leaders: Some Interlocutors Elicit Greater Convergence Across Conversations and Across Characteristics

Priva

Sanker

2020

Cognitive Science

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Are there individual tendencies in convergence, such that some speakers consistently converge more than others? Similarly, are there natural "leaders," speakers with whom others converge more? Are such tendencies consistent across different linguistic characteristics? We use the Switchboard Corpus to perform a large-scale convergence study of speakers in multiple conversations with different interlocutors, across six linguistic characteristics. Because each speaker participated in several conversations, it is possible to look for individual differences in speakers' likelihood of converging and interlocutors' likelihood of eliciting convergence. We only find evidence for individual differences by interlocutor, not by speaker: There are natural leaders of convergence, who elicit more convergence than others across characteristics and across conversations. The lack of similar evidence for speakers who converge more than others suggests that social factors have a stronger effect in mediating convergence than putative individual tendencies in producing convergence, or that such tendencies are characteristic-specific.

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“…A multitude of factors, including bilingualism (Spinu et al, 2020), musical experience (Coumel et al, 2019), and general cognitive processes (working memory: Reiterer et al, 2011; neurocognitive flexibility: Reiterer et al, 2013) have been shown to correlate with individuals' extent of imitation. The list of social or personality-related factors proposed to condition imitation expands even further when considering the better-studied domain of phonetic convergence (see Wade et al, 2020 for a review). While intriguing, findings can be inconsistent and often fail to replicate across studies, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions about the individual characteristics governing imitation (Cohen Priva & Sanker, 2020;Wade, 2022).…”

Section: Predictors Of Variability In 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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The Reliability of Individual Differences in VOT Imitation

Cited by 17 publications

References 47 publications

On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition

On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition

Natural Leaders: Some Interlocutors Elicit Greater Convergence Across Conversations and Across Characteristics

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

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