When does perceptual normalization affect phonetic convergence?
People unconsciously shift their pronunciation towards speech they hear. This can be observed gradually over the course of years in a new environment, but small shifts also occur spontaneously within a few minutes of exposure. While tendency towards convergence is well-established, most existing work cannot determine how this interacts with perceptual normalization to different talkers. In other words, do people converge towards how a speaker talks, including the linguistic patterns they exhibit, or the raw acoustics of their voice? This talk uses English sibilants as a test case and presents multiple lab studies of /s/ and /sh/ convergence. Results indicate that most speakers converge towards raw acoustics and these shifts are not constrained by phonological category boundaries. This has implications for theories of speech sound representation, the perception-production link, and second language pedagogy.
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