Research on phonetic imitation or phonetic convergence hasestablished that talkers naturally accommodate duringinteraction (Goldinger 1998, Namy et al. 2002, Pardo 2006).Traditionally, the method of determining imitation has beenan AXB judgment task where listeners judge the perceptualsimilarity of a participant's A and B tokens from a pre-taskproduction and shadowed production, for example, to X – aproduction from a model talker in the task. At better thanchance levels, listeners judge the shadowed production to bemore similar to the model talker's production. This methodallows listeners to make use of an array of perceptual cuesfor imitation. It is left unknown, however, what within thephonetic structure is being imitated. What is and what canbe imitated have significant implications for the level ofdetail in linguistic representation. More recently, work byShockley et al. (2004) and Nielsen (2008) has demonstratedthat American English participants imitate VOT. Thepurpose of the current project is to examine whether spectralcharacteristics of the vowels are imitated in a lexicalshadowing task.
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