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Implicit imitation of regional dialects

Implicit imitation of regional dialects. Sara C. Phillips First Qualifying Paper Presentation 5-23-11. slides (with references) available at: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~phillips email: phillips@ling.osu.edu. Acknowledgements.

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Implicit imitation of regional dialects

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  1. Implicit imitation of regional dialects Sara C. Phillips First Qualifying Paper Presentation 5-23-11 slides (with references) available at: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~phillips email: phillips@ling.osu.edu

  2. Acknowledgements • Cynthia G. Clopper, Shari R. Speer, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Mark Pitt, Jane Stuart-Smith • Lauren Eskin, Joselyn Gilbert, and Kenney Hensley for help in data collection and annotation • Speer Lab, Phonies, Changelings, SoMean, Proseminar,Cogfest 2010, MCWOP 2010

  3. Imitation People imitate one another’s speech: • gestures, speech rate, f0 (Giles et al. 1991, Jungers et al. 2002) • VOT (Shockley et al., 2004; Nielsen, 2011) • vowel quality (Babel, 2009; Tilsen, 2009) • Interactive (“accommodation”) • Non-interactive (“phonetic imitation”)

  4. Phonetic Imitation: Experience • Imitation in word shadowing increases with exposure to the stimulus materials (Goldinger 1998). • Shadowers imitate stimulus recordings more if they approximate the phonotactic structure of their native language (Nye and Fowler 2003). • Imitation doesn’t happen across the board (Babel 2009). • Some vowels (/a/, /æ/) are imitated more than others. • Speakers stay within pre-existing production inventory while imitating.

  5. Research Questions • What is the effect of regional dialect on imitation? • Is real life experience like in-lab exposure? • More imitation of familiar dialects? • Do shadowers imitate talker-specific or dialect-specific properties? • Salient dialect features (e.g. vowel quality) imitated more than other features (e.g. duration, f0)? (Pierrehumbert 2002)

  6. Shadowing Task: Motivation • Non-interactive, socially impoverished task • if real life dialect familiarity is similar to lab experience, shadowers should imitate familiar dialects more than unfamiliar dialects • should have more exemplars similar to familiar dialect targets, thus more ability to produce close imitation

  7. Shadowing Task: Participants 31 monolingual American English speakers 3 groups according to dialect: “Midland”: 15 [9M/6F] (e.g. Columbus, OH) “Northern”: 8 [3M/5F] (e.g. Cleveland, OH) “Mobile”: 8 [2M/6F] (e.g. Mid and South)

  8. Dialect Regions Northern Midland

  9. Shadowing Task: Stimuli • 55 monosyllabic CVC English words • from the Indiana Speech Project corpus (Clopper et al., 2002) • produced by each of 6 female talkers from two dialect regions : 3 “Midland” talkers 3 “Northern” talkers Total : 330 targets

  10. Shadowing Task: Procedure Word-shadowing task (Goldinger, 1998) • Part 1 (baseline) : read all 55 words aloud • Part 2 (shadowing) : hear all 330 targets and repeat aloud as quickly and naturally as possible • implicit imitation – not told to imitate • No blocking by target dialect region or talker, random presentation order

  11. Shadowing Task: Measurements • vowel quality (F1, F2) at vowel midpoint • duration (vowel, onset, coda) • f0 at vowel midpoint • f0 trajectory (change in f0) • response time

  12. Shadowing Task: Predictions • More imitation of tokens from familiar dialect region than unfamiliar dialect region • Interaction between shadower dialect and target dialect (Mid-North < Mid-Mid) • Northern shadowers may be familiar with both target dialects • More imitation of salient dialect features? • North /ɛ/, /æ/ • Midland /u/

  13. Shadowing Task: Results • No significant interactions between shadower dialect and target dialect • Effects of shadower dialect: • midpoint f0: Northern < Midland (t = -2.3, p < .05) • vowel duration: Mobile and Northern > Midland (t = 2.5, p < .05; t = 4.1, p < .001) • More imitation of longer (t = 11.6, p < .001), higher f0 (t = 2.1, p < .05) targets

  14. AXB Task: Perceived Imitation • baseline, original target, repetition  A, X, B • 6 shadowers: 2 Midland, 2 North, 2 Mobile • 60 listeners (10 per shadower) • Question: Did shadowers imitate dialect-specific variation in addition to talker-specific variation?

  15. AXB Task AX B baseline target repetition “Which one, A or B, sounds more similar to, or like a better imitation of, X?”

  16. AXB Task AX B repetition target baseline “Which one, A or B, sounds more similar to, or like a better imitation of, X?”

  17. AXB Task: Dialect or Talker? 3 conditions: 1. same talker X = original talker from shadowing task 2. different talker X = different talker, same dialect as original 3. different dialect X = different dialect, different talker from original same talker different talker different dialect

  18. AXB Task: Dialect or Speaker? Imitation only of talker: same talker imitated more than different talkerdifferent dialect same talker target talker shadower shadower different talker shadower shadower shadower different dialect talker dialect both

  19. AXB Task: Dialect or Speaker? Imitation of dialect and talker: same talker, different talker imitated more than different dialect same talker target talker shadower shadower different talker shadower shadower shadower different dialect talker dialect both

  20. AXB Results: Condition • listeners were sensitive to dialect mismatch • shadowers may have imitated dialect properties

  21. AXB: Dialect Markers? • Acoustic correlates with AXB scores

  22. AXB: Dialect Markers? • Acoustic correlates with AXB scores not dialect markers …but in our stimuli, Northern targets were generally longer than Midland targets (t = 12.8, p < .0001) could create illusion of dialect imitation

  23. Conclusions • No evidence that shadowers imitated familiar dialects more than unfamiliar dialects • AXB perception results: • imitation of talker-specific variation • illusion (?) of dialect imitation • Only very small degree of imitation

  24. Future directions • Replicate with… • all low frequency words, which are likely to be imitated (Goldinger 1998) • dialects that are less mutually familiar e.g. North, Midland and South • focus on vowels that differentiate dialects (e.g. /ɛ/, /æ/, /u/, /aj/) • better control of stimulus duration

  25. Future directions • Replicate with… • all low frequency words, which are likely to be imitated (Goldinger 1998) • dialects that are less mutually familiar e.g. North, Midland and South • focus on vowels that differentiate dialects (e.g. /ɛ/, /æ/, /u/, /aj/) • better control of stimulus duration

  26. References • Babel, M. E. (2009). Phonetic and social selectivity in speech accommodation. Unpublished dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. • Baker, R. E., & Bradlow, A. R. (2009). Variability in word duration as a function of probability, speech style, and prosody. Language and Speech, 52(4), 391-413. • Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13, 145-204. • Clopper, C. G., & Bradlow, A. R. (2008). Perception of dialect variation in noise: Intelligibility and classification. Language and Speech, 51(3), 175-198. • Clopper, C. G., Carter, A. K., Dillon, C. M., Hernandez, L. R., Pisoni, D. B., Clarke, C. M., et al. (2002). The Indiana Speech Project: An overview of the development of a multi-talker multi-dialect speech corpus. In D. B. Pisoni (Ed.), Speech Research Laboratory Progress Report 25: Research on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 367-380). Bloomington, IN: Speech Research Laboratory, Indiana University. • Floccia, C., Goslin, J., Girard, F., & Konopczynski, G. (2006). Does a regional accent perturb speech processing? Journal of Experimenal Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32(5), 1276-1293. • Fowler, C. A., & Housum, J. (1987). Talkers' signaling of "new" and "old" words in speech and listeners' perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 489-504. • Giles, H. (1973). Accent mobility: a model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics, 15, 87-105. • Giles, H., Coupland, N., & Coupland, J. (1991). Accommodation theory: Communication, context, and consequence. In H. Giles, J. Coupland & N. Coupland (Eds.), Contexts of Accommodation (pp. 1-68). • Goldinger, S. D. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review, 105(2), 251-279. • Goldinger, S. D. (2000). The role of perceptual episodes in lexical processing. Paper presented at the Proceedings of SWAP (Spoken Word Access Processes). • Jungers, M. K., Palmer, C., & Speer, S. R. (2002). Time after time: The coordinating influence of tempo in music and speech. Cognitive Processing, 2, 21-35. • Nielsen, K. Y. (2011). Specificity and abstractness of VOT imitation. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 132-142. • Nye, P. W., & Fowler, C. A. (2003). Shadowing latency and imitation: the effect of familiarity with the phonetic patterning of English. Journal of Phonetics, 31, 63-79. • Pardo, J. S. (2006). On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 2382-2393. • Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2004). The interactive-alignment model: Developments and refinements. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(2), 212-219. • Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2002). Word-specific phonetics. In C. Gussenhoven & N. Warner (Eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology VII (pp. 101-139). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. • Sumner, M., & Samuel, A. G. (2009). The effect of experience on the perception and representation of dialect variants. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 487-501. • Tilsen, S. (2009). Subphonemic and cross-phonemic priming in vowel shadowing: Evidence for the involvement of exemplars in production. Journal of Phonetics, 37, 276-296.

  27. plots of acoustic correlations

  28. plots of acoustic correlations

  29. plots of acoustic correlations

  30. Background: Dialect Processing Processing benefit for familiar dialects: • Unfamiliar regional dialects can create temporary RT lag in a lexical decision task (Floccia et al., 2006). • Unfamiliar dialects are less intelligible in noise than familiar dialects (Clopper & Bradlow, 2008).

  31. Background: Dialect Processing • Mere exposure to a dialect can improve performance on lexical decision tasks. • R-ful speakers in NY are faster and more accurate in lexical decision using R-less stimuli if they have exposure to R-less speech (Sumner & Samuel, 2009). • “Familiar” = both perception and production

  32. Statistics • Separate linear mixed effects models predicting imitation score for each acoustic measure. • Fixed Effects: • shadower dialect region • target dialect region • target measurement (ex. duration of target) • gender • Random Effects: • item (word) • subject

  33. Vowel centralization • Hard to distinguish between imitation and centralization. • Second mention reduction? (Fowler & Housum 1987; Baker & Bradlow 2009) • only of vowel quality, not duration • shadowed productions were not shorter than the baseline

  34. AXB task: measured imitation • What did the AXB shadowers imitate? • vowel quality n.s. • vowel duration n.s. Mobile shad: stim duration t = 4.372 • onset duration t = 3.305 • coda duration t = 5.112 • midpoint f0 n.s. • f0 trajectory n.s.

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