Molly Babel

Evidence for phonetic and social selectivity in spontaneous phonetic imitation

Abstract Spontaneous phonetic imitation is the process by which a talker comes to be more similar-sounding to a model talker as the result of exposure. The current experiment investigates this phenomenon, examining whether vowel spectra are automatically imitated in a lexical shadowing task and how social liking affects imitation. Participants were assigned to either a Black talker or White talker; within this talker manipulation, participants were either put into a condition with a digital image of their assigned model talker or one without an image. Liking was measured through attractiveness rating. Participants accommodated toward vowels selectively; the low vowels /ae ɑ/ showed the strongest effects of imitation compared to the vowels /i o u/, but the degree of this trend varied across conditions. In addition to these findings of phonetic selectivity, the degree to which these vowels were imitated was subtly affected by attractiveness ratings and this also interacted with the experimental condition. The results demonstrate the labile nature of linguistic segments with respect to both their perceptual encoding and their variation in production.

Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2009) Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English Molly Babel Department of Linguistics University of British Columbia and University of California, Berkeley INTRODUCTION As people learn to speak, they acquire the language and dialect spoken around them. The exact forms of every level of linguistic representation – from syntax to lexical choice to pronunciation – are all determined by the patterns of the ambient language. This is done with great ease as young language learners. It has been documented, however, that after a certain age children are unable to fully acquire particularly complex phonological aspects of a second dialect (Payne 1980, Chambers 1992). Trudgill (1986:58) argues that this is due to the fact that accommodation of sound structure in dialect contact is “phonetic rather than phonological” (emphasis in original). Despite the purported difficulty in acquiring a new dialect, research on adults exposed to new dialects demonstrates that ways of speaking do indeed change. For example, Munro, Derwing, and Flege (1999) found that accents of Canadians living in Alabama were perceived by listeners as sounding intermediate between those of Canadians living in Canada and native Alabamans. A series of studies have focused on longitudinal changes within the speech of a single speaker over a fifty year span. Harrington (2006, 2007) and Harrington, Palethrope, and Watson (2000a, b) have analyzed vowel changes in the speech of the Queen Elizabeth II. The recordings under analysis were her yearly Christmas broadcasts from 1952 through 2002. After accounting for maturational changes in the vocal tract, this work has demonstrated that the Queen’s vowels shifted in the direction of Southern British English, away from Received

The role of fundamental frequency in phonetic accommodation.

Previous research has argued that fundamental frequency is a critical component of phonetic accommodation. We tested this hypothesis in an auditory naming task with two conditions. Participants in an Unfiltered Condition completed an auditory naming task with a single male model talker. A second group of participants was assigned to a Filtered Condition where the same stimuli had been high-pass filtered at 300 Hz, thereby eliminating the fundamental frequency. Acoustic analysis of f0 revealed that participants assigned to the Unfiltered Condition imitated the pitch of the model talker more than those assigned to the Filtered Condition. Although accommodation was statistically significant, the effect was small, so we followed with a perception study to examine listeners’ abilities to detect differences in accommodation across conditions. Shadowed tokens from participants in the Unfiltered Condition were indeed judged by listeners to be more similar to the model talker’s productions that those from participants in the Filtered Condition. However, acoustic measurements and listener judgments of accommodation were not significantly correlated, enforcing the intuitive concept that accommodation and listeners’ judgments of similarity are holistic and do not hone in on singular features in the acoustic signal.

On the perceptual basis of distinctive features: Evidence from the perception of fricatives by Dutch and English speakers

Abstract Two speech perception experiments explored the auditory basis of distinctive features. Experiment 1 found that Dutch listeners rated [s] and [ʃ] as more similar to each other than American English listeners did. We attributed this to the lack of a phonemic distinction between [s] and [ʃ] in Dutch phonology in addition to their relationship via a productive phonological rule in Dutch. Experiment 1 also found that Dutch listeners rated [θ] and [s], and [θ] and [ʃ] as more similar to each other than did American English listeners. We attributed this to the lack of [θ] in the Dutch inventory. Experiment 2 found that Dutch and American English listeners did not significantly differ from each other in a speeded discrimination task with the same stimuli as Experiment 1. Reaction times in Experiment 2 were highly correlated with the rating data of Experiment 1 indicating that the general pattern of response in Experiment 1 was based on auditory similarity, with language-specific effects superimposed on the general pattern. The auditory basis of distinctive features found here accords with Stevens’ (1989) quantal theory account of the feature [±anterior]. We conclude that phonetic similarity is comprised of three components: (1) auditory similarity, (2) phonetic inventory, and (3) language-specific patterns of alternation.

Descent and Diffusion in Language Diversification: A Study of Western Numic Dialectology

The two branches of Western Numic are the Mono and Northern Paiute languages. We argue that this taxonomic structure did not arise as usually assumed in historical linguistics, through increased differentiation brought about by changes internal to each branch, but rather that diffusion between Western and Central Numic played a crucial role in forming the Western Numic family tree. More generally, we suggest that diffusion plays a greater role in language diversification than is usually recognized.

Expectations and speech intelligibility

Socio-indexical cues and paralinguistic information are often beneficial to speech processing as this information assists listeners in parsing the speech stream. Associations that particular populations speak in a certain speech style can, however, make it such that socio-indexical cues have a cost. In this study, native speakers of Canadian English who identify as Chinese Canadian and White Canadian read sentences that were presented to listeners in noise. Half of the sentences were presented with a visual-prime in the form of a photo of the speaker and half were presented in control trials with fixation crosses. Sentences produced by Chinese Canadians showed an intelligibility cost in the face-prime condition, whereas sentences produced by White Canadians did not. In an accentedness rating task, listeners rated White Canadians as less accented in the face-prime trials, but Chinese Canadians showed no such change in perceived accentedness. These results suggest a misalignment between an expected and an observed speech signal for the face-prime trials, which indicates that social information about a speaker can trigger linguistic associations that come with processing benefits and costs.

Novelty and social preference in phonetic accommodation

Abstract Phonetic imitation is the unintentional, spontaneous acquisition of speech characteristics of another talker. Previous work has shown that imitation is strongly moderated by social preference in adults, and that social preference affects childrens speech acquisition within peer groups. Such findings have led to the suggestion that phonetic imitation is related to larger processes of sound change in a change-by-accommodation model. This study examines how preferential processing of particular voice types affects spontaneous phonetic accommodation, interpreting the results in the context of how sound change can be propagated through a speech community. To explore this question eight model talkers previously rated as attractive, unattractive, typical, and atypical for each gender were used in an auditory naming paradigm. Twenty participants completed the task, and an AXB measure was used to quantify imitation. Female participants imitated more than male participants, but this varied across model voices. Females were found to rely more on social preference than men, while both groups imitated the atypical voices. The results suggest that females adapt their speech to auditory input more readily, but the nature of the accommodation does not qualify as direct evidence for a change-by-accommodation model given the constrained context of the task.

Can mergers-in-progress be unmerged in speech accommodation?

This study examines spontaneous phonetic accommodation of a dialect with distinct categories by speakers who are in the process of merging those categories. We focus on the merger of the NEAR and SQUARE lexical sets in New Zealand English, presenting New Zealand participants with an unmerged speaker of Australian English. Mergers-in-progress are a uniquely interesting sound change as they showcase the asymmetry between speech perception and production. Yet, we examine mergers using spontaneous phonetic imitation, which is phenomenon that is necessarily a behavior where perceptual input influences speech production. Phonetic imitation is quantified by a perceptual measure and an acoustic calculation of mergedness using a Pillai-Bartlett trace. The results from both analyses indicate spontaneous phonetic imitation is moderated by extra-linguistic factors such as the valence of assigned conditions and social bias. We also find evidence for a decrease in the degree of mergedness in post-exposure productions. Taken together, our results suggest that under the appropriate conditions New Zealanders phonetically accommodate to Australian English and that in the process of speech imitation, mergers-in-progress can, but do not consistently, become less merged.

The sequential cueing effect in children's speech production

This article investigated the development of phonological encoding in speech production by examining the production of reiterant two-word sequences varying in phonological similarity. Two groups of typically developing children and a group of college-aged adults participated. Both groups of children produced target words with longer durations when they were preceded by words sharing initial consonant–vowel (CV) sequences than when preceded by phonologically unrelated words or words sharing vowel–consonant (VC) sequences. For adults, the duration of target words was shorter when they were preceded by words sharing final VC sequences than in the other conditions. The developmental decrease in the influence of CV-related prime words on target-word duration may be related to changes in the level of activation of lexical items during speech production. Developmental changes in the influence of VC-related prime words are less clear, but may be due to age-group specific behavior in the production of identical sequences of words. Children’s early speech production differs considerably from that of adults. Young children possess a limited repertoire of segments and syllable shapes. As a consequence, children’s first words are coarse approximations of the target forms. They typically are characterized by systematic additions, deletions, and substitutions relative to adults’ productions. Throughout the preschool and early elementary school years, these differences decline. Eventually, accurate phoneme production is mastered and children produce words that adults identify as matching the target forms. It is generally thought that this is the point at which a child has acquired the phonology of the ambient language. In contrast, a great deal of evidence suggests that children’s phonologies continue to develop and mature beyond the point when they produce words that match adult targets. Acoustic studies of children’s speech that is perceived to be correct have shown that speech–motor control continues to develop after phoneme accuracy is mastered. A variety of studies have shown that the temporal and spectral characteristics of children’s speech, as well as variability in these measures, continue to develop throughout childhood and adolescence (e.g., Kent & Forner, 1980; Lee, Potamianos, & Narayanan, 1999; Munson, 2004; Nittrouer, 1995; Smith, 1978; Smith, Kenney, & Hussein, 1996). In general, the duration of children’s speech declines throughout childhood. In addition, intraspeaker variability

Perceptual fluency and judgments of vocal aesthetics and stereotypicality.

Research has shown that processing dynamics on the perceivers end determine aesthetic pleasure. Specifically, typical objects, which are processed more fluently, are perceived as more attractive. We extend this notion of perceptual fluency to judgments of vocal aesthetics. Vocal attractiveness has traditionally been examined with respect to sexual dimorphism and the apparent size of a talker, as reconstructed from the acoustic signal, despite evidence that gender-specific speech patterns are learned social behaviors. In this study, we report on a series of three experiments using 60 voices (30 females) to compare the relationship between judgments of vocal attractiveness, stereotypicality, and gender categorization fluency. Our results indicate that attractiveness and stereotypicality are highly correlated for female and male voices. Stereotypicality and categorization fluency were also correlated for male voices, but not female voices. Crucially, stereotypicality and categorization fluency interacted to predict attractiveness, suggesting the role of perceptual fluency is present, but nuanced, in judgments of human voices.