Comparing Phonetic Convergence in Children and Adults

Observations by sociolinguists suggest that when children relocate to a new community, they rapidly learn to imitate their peers, adopting the new local accent faster and more effectively than adults. However, few well-controlled laboratory experiments have been conducted comparing speech or accent...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language and speech 2022-03, Vol.65 (1), p.240-260
Main Authors: Paquette-Smith, Melissa, Schertz, Jessamyn, Johnson, Elizabeth K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accentuation
Adult
Adults
Age differences
Australia
Australian English
Canada
Canadian English
Child
Children
English as a second language
Humans
Imitation
Laboratory Experiments
Language
Mandarin
Non-native accent
Phonetics
Shadowing
Speech
Speech Perception
Stops
Voice onset time (VOT)
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Summary:Observations by sociolinguists suggest that when children relocate to a new community, they rapidly learn to imitate their peers, adopting the new local accent faster and more effectively than adults. However, few well-controlled laboratory experiments have been conducted comparing speech or accent imitation across ages. Here, we investigated Canadian English-speaking children’s and adults’ imitation of three model speakers: a Canadian English talker, an Australian English talker, and a non-native Mandarin English talker who learned English later in life. The speech of all three talkers was manipulated to have elongated voice onset time (VOT) on word initial stop consonants. The dependent measure was how much participants would lengthen their VOTs after exposure to one of the talkers in two paradigms: delayed shadowing (Experiment 1) and immediate shadowing (Experiment 2). We predicted that overall children would show more imitation than adults, particularly when imitating the Canadian English talker, given previous work on children’s social preferences. Although we did not observe age differences in either study, when shadowing was immediate, we found that imitation was influenced by the accent of the speaker, but not in the manner we predicted: both age groups imitated the Mandarin-accented model more strongly than the Canadian model. When shadowing was delayed, we observed no evidence of imitation. We discuss our findings in light of other recent work, and conclude that the development of speech imitation is an area ripe for further investigation.
ISSN:0023-8309
1756-6053
DOI:10.1177/00238309211013864