In his seminal work, Goldinger (1998) used a shadowing technique in which people were asked to repeat a series of words (so called primes) presented to them through headphones. The question of what constitutes the target of imitation has been discussed in the literature but there is relatively little empirical work directed at systematically investigating its properties. The present study examines how the target of imitation evolves with experience with a talker. These examples of imitation must rely on a general representational target of the interlocutors’ speech, one that has been built from specific utterances but that can abstract away from them. Finally, the speech of interlocutors in conversational settings has revealed phonetic convergence ( Pardo, 2006 Pardo, Jay, & Krauss, 2010). There is also evidence that the speech of adults can be altered to reflect phonetic characteristics of the dialect or language spoken in the environment these individuals are immersed in later in life ( Sancier & Fowler, 1997 Evans & Iverson, 2007). However, imitation of a talker’s pronunciation has been observed on words that had not been specifically heard before (e.g., Shockley, Sabadini, & Fowler, 2004 Nielsen, 2011), as well as when there was a substantial delay (i.e., as long as several days) between exposure to an utterance and its subsequent imitation (e.g., Goldinger & Azuma, 2004). Under these circumstances, the target of imitation simply consists of the utterance being shadowed. In its simplest form, imitation can be observed in a shadowing task when people repeat (or shadow) a spoken word immediately after hearing it. Although the term ‘imitation’ can be used to describe a voluntary action, we will use it to describe the involuntary, and most likely unconscious, phenomenon in which the speech of a talker is altered to resemble that of a model talker. Some scholars have referred to this internal representation as the ‘target of imitation’. The mapping is mediated by an internal encoding onto a representation of the auditory signal that gives rise to the production of an utterance that shares some phonetic properties with the signal. Vocal imitation involves the mapping of an auditory signal onto an articulatory program. Imitation is a perceptually-guided action ( Meltzoff & Moore, 1997). Imitation of another speaker appears to involve tracking general articulatory properties about the speaker, and not solely what was specific to the most recent experience. The influence of past experience on imitation increases with increased delay between prime and target. Furthermore, this imitation also reflects the degree of nasality demonstrated by overall experience with the speaker’s vowels. People spontaneously modify coarticulatory nasality to resemble that demonstrated in the prime they were exposed to. The version of the prime participants heard varied, whether consistent with their past experience with nasality from the talker or inconsistent, and the duration of delay between prime and target. Two versions of primes with nasal codas were used: primes with a natural degree of vowel nasality and hypernasalized primes. We investigated phonetic imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasality using an adapted shadowing paradigm in which participants produced a printed word (target) after hearing a different word (prime).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |