Phonetic and Social Selectivity in Speech Accommodation by Molly Elizabeth Babel BA

182 Pages·2009·1.53 MB·English

UC Berkeley
Dissertations, Department of Linguistics
Title
Phonetic and Social Selectivity in Speech Accommodation
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1mb4n1mv
Author
Babel, Molly
Publication Date
2009
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library
University of California
Phonetic and Social Selectivity in Speech Accommodation
by
Molly Elizabeth Babel
B.A. (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) 2004
M.A. (University of California, Berkeley) 2006
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Linguistics
in the
GRADUATE DIVISION
of the
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Committee in charge:
Professor Keith Johnson, Chair
Professor Andrew Garrett
Professor Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton
Spring 2009
The dissertation of Molly Elizabeth Babel is approved:
Chair Date
Date
Date
University of California, Berkeley
Spring 2009
Phonetic and Social Selectivity in Speech Accommodation
Copyright 2009
by
Molly Elizabeth Babel
1
Abstract
Phonetic and Social Selectivity in Speech Accommodation
by
Molly Elizabeth Babel
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Keith Johnson, Chair
Spontaneousphoneticimitation-thephenomenonwhereinteractingtalkerscometobemore
similar-sounding - may be an important mechanism in dialect convergence and historical
sound change. Recent research has been concerned with whether spontaneous imitation is
an automatic (and hence unavoidable) process, or whether it is consciously mediated by
social factors (e.g., Giles and Coupland 1991, Goldinger 1998, Pickering and Garrod 2004,
Pardo 2006). Recently, Nielsen (2008) suggests that imitation of VOT can be influenced by
abstract linguistic knowledge as well. This dissertation presents the result from a project
that investigated phonetic imitation of vowels. The results show that talkers accommodate
on the first and second formants of the model talker in the task, but that not all vowels
are imitated to a significant degree. In this study of American English, only the low vowels
/A/ and /æ/ exhibit strong imitation effects, and this effect lies primarily within the F1
dimension. I argue that this is due to the increased repertoire of production variants
2
talkers store for low vowels as a result of the difference in jaw height in accented and
unaccented environments. In addition to these findings of phonetic selectivity, the degree
to which vowels were imitated were subtly affected by implicit social measures of how the
participant felt about the model talker in the experiment. The results of this study suggest
that participants only make use of pre-existing tokens within their phonetic repertoire in
a shadowing task and that the use of those variants is mediated by implicit social factors.
Such results demonstrate that phonetic imitation is not automatic in terms of occurring
all the time, but indeed automatic in terms of happening subconsciously. That is, the
social factors that mediate the imitation process are not explicit social choices, but implicit
socio-cognitive biases.
Professor Keith Johnson
Dissertation Committee Chair
i
To you.
ii
Contents
List of Figures iv
List of Tables viii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 The issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Accommodation in non-linguistic behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2 Background 12
2.1 Phonetic accommodation in the real world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Phonetic Accommodation in the Laboratory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.2.1 Communication Accommodation Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.2.2 Laboratory phonology and exemplar-based models . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2.3 A psycholinguistic model of accommodation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.3 Speech variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.3.1 Speech accommodation and style-shifting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.3.2 Speech and Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.4 Brief Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3 Methodology 55
3.1 Shadowing Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.1.1 Stimuli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.1.2 Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.1.3 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.2 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.3 Implicit Association Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.3.1 Stimuli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.3.2 Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.3.3 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.3.4 IAT Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.4 Predictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
iii
4 Results & Discussion 73
4.1 Mixed Effects Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4.2 Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
4.2.1 Asocial Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
4.2.2 Black talker Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.2.3 White talker Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
4.2.4 Black Social Condition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
4.2.5 White Social Condition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
4.2.6 Degrees of Imitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
4.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
5 Conclusion 135
5.1 General summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
5.2 Discipline specific summaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
5.2.1 Phonetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
5.2.2 Sociolinguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
5.2.3 Psycholinguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
iv
List of Figures
3.1 Picture of the Black talker whose voice and image were used in the experiment. 58
3.2 PictureoftheWhitetalkerwhosevoiceandimagewereusedintheexperiment. 58
3.3 Mean formant values taken from tokens used as stimuli for the shadowing task. 60
3.4 The F1-F2 location of the vowel nuclei for each word stimulus for the two
talkers.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.5 Participant view of a trial in either Block 3 or 5 of IAT depending on partic-
ipants’ assigned condition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.1 Spontaneous phonetic imitation in the Asocial Conditions for the male par-
ticipants by Condition. The Difference in Distance measure on the y-axis
indicates the amount of phonetic imitation. A value of zero shows no change
in vowel production as a result of auditory exposure to the model talker. A
negative value demonstrates phonetic imitation and a positive value demon-
strates acoustic divergence. Blocks 4, 5, and 6 are Shadowing Blocks while
Block 7 is the Post-task Block. The error bars represent 95% confidence
intervals.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.2 Spontaneous phonetic imitation in the Asocial Conditions for each vowel for
the male participants collapsedacross Condition. The Difference in Distance
measure on the y-axis indicates the amount of phonetic imitation. A value
of zero shows no change in vowel production as a result of auditory exposure
to the model talker. A negative value demonstrates phonetic imitation and
a positive value demonstrates vocalic divergence. Blocks 4, 5, and 6 are
Shadowing Blocks while Block 7 is the Post-task Block. The error bars
represent 95% confidence intervals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.3 Formant plot displaying the spontaneous phonetic imitation in the Black
Asocial Condition for the male participants. Formant values are plotted in
the Bark scale. The Black model talker’s mean vowels are plotted in black.
Male participants’ Pre-task (Block 2) vowel means are plotted in light gray
and their productions from the Final Shadowing Block (Block 6) are plotted
in dark gray. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82