Speech Accommodation, Convergence, and Imitation

Presenters: Cynthia Clopper

T2MRD2

Humans adopt aspects of one another’s speech patterns in processes variably called accommodation, convergence, and imitation. This speech accommodation emerges in both interactive and non-interactive (lab) contexts, in the absence of explicit instruction to imitate, and across linguistic levels of representation (acoustic, phonetic, and phonological). Accommodation leads to within-talker synchronic variation and is proposed as a mechanism of diachronic linguistic change. This workshop explores the empirical nature of speech accommodation and its theoretical implications for our understanding of the linguistic representations underlying and linking human speech perception and production. The topics will include: (1) the cognitive mechanisms proposed to underlie accommodation; (2) proposed metrics for quantifying speech accommodation; (3) acoustic-phonetic normalization in accommodation; (4) levels of phonetic and phonological representation in accommodation; and (5) the role of perceptual salience in the magnitude of accommodation. Each of these topics represents an ongoing debate in the speech accommodation literature and the assigned readings for the workshop will introduce attendees to both sides of these debates. Moreover, these topics have broader theoretical implications for key questions in speech processing, including abstraction in the cognitive representations of speech, how cognitive representations are linked for speech perception and production processes, and how these representations are flexibly implemented in language use in real-time interactions.

Keywords: Interaction, Processing, Phonetics, Phonology, Psycholinguistics, Variation, Language Change, Learning

Presenters

Cynthia Clopper

Ohio State University

Cynthia Clopper is an Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. She received a B.A. in Linguistics and Russian from Duke University, an M.A. in Linguistics from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from Indiana University. She spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher in Psychology at Indiana University and one year as a postdoctoral fellow in Linguistics at Northwestern University, both funded by the National Institutes of Health, before joining the faculty at Ohio State. Her major areas of expertise are phonetics, speech perception, sociophonetics, and laboratory phonology. Dr. Clopper’s current research projects examine the effects of geographic mobility and linguistic experience on cross-dialect lexical processing, the relationships between linguistic and indexical sources of variation in speech processing, and native and non-native accent perception by children and adults. She currently serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Language and Speech and on the Editorial Board of Journal of Phonetics.