Perception-production loop in native–non-native dialogs: Phonetic convergence.
Natalie Lewandowski, Grzegorz Dogil · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
The present study investigated the relation between the ability to adapt to the speech of a foreign language dialog partner and the individual variable of language talent. It was assumed that the actual degree to which one can converge to another speaker’s pronunciation actually depends on his/her ability to pay attention to fine phonetic detail, to encode it, and to immediately reuse it in running speech—which was defined as phonetic talent. In order to analyze convergence in dialog, ten speakers of German (classified into two groups according to their proficiency and talent) performed a Diapix-task with a British and an American English conversational partner. Our main research goal can be described as follows: Does phonetic talent play a role in the perception-production loop and influence the process of accommodation towards a foreign dialog partner? The statistical analysis of the acoustic measurements revealed a significant effect for the factor talent across the American/British English conditions and also within the AE condition, indicating that the talented speakers have converged more. All results will be discussed assuming an underlying dynamic process, possibly involving a simultaneous interplay of convergence as well as divergence within a conversation.