On vocal alignment to American- and Spanish-accented talkers Public

Abstract

Vocal alignment is the tendency to change one's speech productions to more closely match those of another individual. Some theoretical accounts hold that high level, social-motivational goals are the underlying cause of this tendency while others propose that low level, perceptual-motor couplings are the cause. The present study sought to disambiguate these potential mechanisms of vocal alignment, exploiting the social and perceptual qualities of Spanish-accented speech. It was predicted that if vocal alignment was primarily social-motivational, vocal alignment would occur less to Spanish-accented speech. The opposite trend would be observed if alignment was perceptual-motor. Study participants took part in a shadowing task paradigm and heard English word-length utterances produced by four model talkers (2 American English, 2 Spanish). Vocal alignment was assessed by both acoustic measures and listener judgments. Results indicated a significant trend towards vocal alignment. When assessed by acoustic measures, participants seemed to align more to native English speakers, consistent with a social-motivational approach. When assessed by listener judgment, participants aligned more to Spanish-accented speakers. These results suggest that an interaction between low level and high level mechanisms leads to patterns of vocal alignment.

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Shadowers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 AXB Raters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Stimuli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Intelligibility & Accentedness Ratings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Shadowing Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 AXB Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Perceptual Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Shadowing Task Accuracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Shadowing Task Vocal Alignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Acoustic Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 AXB Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

List of Tables, Figures, and Appendices

Table 1.
Proportion of correct responses on the perceptual training task by quartile. . 40

Table 2.

MEM estimates associated with the MEM using Accent, Duration Difference Score,

and f0 Difference Score to predict AXB judgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Figure 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Figure 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Figure 3A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Figure 3B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Figure 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Appendix A: Full Word List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Psychology
Degree	MA
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Language, Linguistics Psychology, Cognitive Speech Communication
Mot-clé	accented speech Standard American English vocal alignment phonetic convergence shadowing task
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Nygaard, Lynne, Emory University
Committee Members	Gouzoules, Harold, Emory University Namy, Laura, Emory University

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