Jennifer S. Pardo

Montclair State University · Department of Psychology

Phonetic convergence is a form of variation in speech production in which a talker adopts aspects of another talker’s acoustic–phonetic repertoire. To date, this phenomenon has been investigated in non-interactive laboratory tasks extensively and in conversational interaction to a lesser degree. The present study directly compares phonetic converge...

This study consolidates findings on phonetic convergence in a large-scale examination of the impacts of talker sex, word frequency, and model talkers on multiple measures of convergence. A survey of nearly three dozen published reports revealed that most shadowing studies used very few model talkers and did not assess whether phonetic convergence v...

Phonetic convergence is defined as an increase in the similarity of acoustic-phonetic form between talkers. Previous research has demonstrated phonetic convergence both when a talker listens passively to speech and while talkers engage in social interaction. Much of this research has focused on a diverse array of acoustic-phonetic attributes, with...

The current study investigates the influence of lexical factors on phonetic convergence and explores the relationship between acoustic and perceptual measures of convergence. A set of talkers produced baseline and shadowed tokens of target words that varied in frequency and phonological neighbor density independently. Experiment 1 demonstrated the...

This paper introduces a conversational speech corpus collected during the completion of a map-matching task that is available for research purposes via the Montclair State University Digital Commons Data Repository. The Montclair Map Task is a new, role-neutral conversational task that involves paired iconic maps with labeled landmarks and a path d...

When a listener encounters an unfamiliar talker, the ensuing perceptual accommodation to the unique characteristics of the talker has two aspects: (1) the listener assesses acoustic characteristics of speech to resolve the properties of the talker's sound production; and, (2) the listener appraises the talker's idiolect, subphonemic phonetic proper...

Conversation can be messy and unpredictable, making it an impractical target for rigorous scientific investigation. Controlled studies have introduced constraints on free-form conversation by using interviews, referential communication tasks, or completely constrained communication frames (such as semi-scripted sentence prompts). The upshot is that...

In Carol Fowler's Direct Realist account of speech perception, linguistically significant gestures of the vocal tract are a common currency for both speech perception and production. A straightforward prediction of this account is that listeners will produce what they perceive, leading to imitation or gestural drift. Many studies by Fowler and coll...

Investigations of phonetic convergence report conflicting results with respect to talker sex. Some studies report that females converge to a greater degree than males, while others find no difference or the opposite pattern. These discrepancies frustrate attempts to characterize the impact of talker sex on phonetic variation and convergence in a st...

Despite nearly 2 decades of research, there is little agreement on a set of factors that modulate phonetic convergence. For example, some studies report effects of talker sex or word frequency on phonetic convergence, while others fail to replicate these effects or report opposing patterns. The current study provides a rigorous examination of the i...

A talker tends to converge to the speech of another talker in their phonetic repertoire. According to Pickering and Garrod’s (2004, 2013) interactive alignment account, this phenomenon results from automatic activation of phonetic forms during speech perception. Across the literature, there is little agreement on a set of factors that modulate phon...

Phonetic convergence has been studied in both speech shadowing tasks and in conversational interaction. In both settings, phonetic convergence has been found to be highly variable, with higher convergence measures usually found in studies that used speech shadowing. In order to examine whether phonetic convergence in both settings arises from simil...

Studies of phonetic convergence in speech shadowing tasks vary with respect to the number of model talkers, the number of shadowers, and the types of items employed. The current study was designed to provide a rigorous examination of the impact of talker sex on phonetic convergence, and to assess whether the effects of word frequency and type of wo...

Findings from confederate paradigms predict that mimicry is an adaptive route to social connection for rejection-sensitive individuals (Lakin, Chartrand, & Arkin, 2008). However, dyadic perspectives predict that whether mimicry leads to perceived connection depends on the rejection sensitivity (RS) of both partners in an interaction. We investigate...

Many studies have reported phonetic convergence during speech shadowing and conversational interaction, with highly variable results. Some of this variability is likely due to effects of talker sex on phonetic convergence. For example, some studies only use a single male model, with both male and female shadowers, while others focus on only male or...

A variety of studies have shown that listeners can learn to identify talkers from voice alone in a simple perceptual learning task. These studies have demonstrated the importance of phonological factors in talker identification learning. The current study examined talker identification learning ability in a set of 48 listeners who learned to identi...

Phonetic convergence is highly variable across studies, measures, and analyses. The current paper describes a study that examined multiple acoustic measures in concert with a perceptual measure of phonetic convergence. The study employed a shadowing task in which multiple talkers shadowed words from a set of models. Across different scales of analy...

Many studies have examined the differences between speech that is produced spontaneously as opposed to read from a prepared script. Most of these studies have focused on prosodic measures taken from clauses, sentences, or connected discourse. Furthermore, studies have shown that listeners are able to identify the context of production when presente...

Phonetic convergence occurs both when individuals interact in conversation and when listeners rapidly repeat words presented over headphones. Results from multiple studies examining phonetic convergence offer an array of often confusing and disparate findings. Reconciling such diverse findings is difficult without a clear rationale for engaging in...

Phonetic convergence occurs both when individuals interact in conversation and when listeners rapidly repeat words presented over headphones. Results from multiple studies examining phonetic convergence offer an array of often confusing and disparate findings. Reconciling such diverse findings is difficult without a clear rationale for engaging in...

Many studies have examined the differences between speech that is produced spontaneously as opposed to read from a prepared script. Most of these studies have focused on prosodic measures taken from clauses, sentences, or connected discourse. Furthermore, studies have shown that listeners are able to identify the context of production when presente...

The current study examined phonetic convergence when talkers alternated roles during conversational interaction. The talkers completed a map navigation task in which they alternated instruction Giver and Receiver roles across multiple map pairs. Previous studies found robust effects of the role of a talker on phonetic convergence, and it was hypoth...

Speech imitation appears to be one of the most fundamental aspects of human vocal behavior. It has been suggested that it plays an important role in speech development and may also form one of the key mechanisms that underlie the emergence and evolution of human languages. Starting early on, infants appear to be matching the prosodic and micro-pros...

Since the beginnings of speech research, the issue of variability has been a central topic in the field. Until recently, solutions to this problem have focused mainly on resolving linguistic forms from variable acoustic realizations, with little systematic consideration of talker variability or social settings. However, acoustic-phonetic variabilit...

Phonetic convergence occurs in both shadowed and conversational speech, and has been assessed using both acoustic and perceptual measures. A previous study using a perceptual similarity test found that phonetic convergence in shadowed speech was not influenced by lexical characteristics, such as word frequency or neighbor density. However, other re...

Phonetic convergence occurs both when individuals interact in conversation and when listeners rapidly repeat words presented over headphones (e.g., Goldinger, 1998; Pardo, 2006). Previous studies have found that characteristics of phonological neighbors also influence both the perception and production of words. Words from high-density neighborhood...

a b s t r a c t Previous studies have found that talkers converge or diverge in phonetic form during a single conversational session or as a result of long-term exposure to a particular linguistic environment. In the current study, five pairs of previously unacquainted male roommates were recorded at four time intervals during the academic year. Ph...

Previous studies have found that characteristics of phonological neighbors influence both the perception and production of words. In particular, words that are high in neighbor density/frequency are processed more slowly and less accurately, but are produced more quickly and with greater reduction. The current study examined the influence of phonol...

Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. A portion of this perceptual flexibility can be attributed to modulation sensitivity in the auditory-to-phonetic projection, although signal-independent properties of lexical neighborhoods also affect intelligibility in utterances com...

This study assessed the impact of a conscious imitation goal on phonetic convergence during conversational interaction. Twelve pairs of unacquainted talkers participated in a conversational task designed to elicit between-talker repetitions of the same lexical items. To assess the degree to which the talkers exhibited phonetic convergence during th...

Most reports of the effects of methamphetamine and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) on speech have been anecdotal. The current study used a within-participant design to assess the effects of methamphetamine and MDMA on speech. Eleven recreational users of amphetamines completed this inpatient, within-participant, double-blind study, during...

Previous studies have found that interacting talkers converge or diverge in phonetic form during a single conversational session and as a result of long-term exposure to a particular linguistic environment. In the current study, five pairs of previously unacquainted male roommates were recorded at five time intervals throughout the academic year. P...

Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. Listeners tolerate distortion or spectral blur in tone analogs, noise band vocoded speech, and acoustic chimeras in utterances ranging from syllables to isolated words and sentences. A portion of this flexibility is attributable to sh...

Acoustic-phonetic attributes of speech are highly variable, and previous studies have found that interacting talkers converge or diverge during a single conversational session. In particular, the role of a talker, the sex of the pair of talkers, and an explicit instruction to imitate have all been found to influence the degree of phonetic convergen...

Previous research found that paired talkers converged in acoustic-phonetic forms over the course of a single conversational interaction. However, convergence was subtle and asymmetrical, leading to the conclusion that speech perception does not reflexively elicit imitation in speech production. In the current study, one member of a pair of talkers...

Social interaction can lead to various forms of accommodative behavior. This project examines convergence in the acoustic-phonetic attributes of conversational speech. Unacquainted same- and mixed-sex pairs of talkers participated in a conversational activity, the HCRC Map Task. The recordings were analyzed acoustically and excerpts from the record...

None of the acoustic constituents of speech is unique to speech, although some features of speech are characteristic: a cyclical rise and fall of energy associated with a train of syllables, amplitude peaks, and valleys in the short-term spectrum, and variation over time in the frequency at which the peaks and valleys occur. Despite all, a perceive...

Following research that found imitation in single-word shadowing, this study examines the degree to which interacting talkers increase similarity in phonetic repertoire during conversational interaction. Between-talker repetitions of the same lexical items produced in a conversational task were examined for phonetic convergence by asking a separate...

Among other sources, acoustic-phonetic variability derives from both personal attributes of a talker and the social structure of a conversational setting. This research begins to detail the effects of such sources by examining the influence of conversational interaction on speech production. A set of talkers provided samples of speech before, durin...

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) mechanistic theory of dialogue attempts to detail the psychological processes involved in communication that are lacking in Clark's theory. By relying on automatic priming and alignment processes, however, the theory falters when it comes to explaining much of dialogic interaction. We argue for the inclusion of less aut...

Physically, no two speech sounds are identical, yet variants of a word are readily perceived as instances of a single lexical category. Despite consistent lexical iden- tification, some intracategory differences are preserved in perception. If such variation is due to important factors, it may be exploited by a talker/listener for nonlexical means....

Our studies revealed two stable modes of perceptual organization, one based on attributes of auditory sensory elements and another based on attributes of patterned sensory variation composed by the aggregation of sensory elements. In a dual-task method, listeners attended concurrently to both aspects, component and pattern, of a sine wave analogue...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 2000.

Linguistically significant gestures of the vocal tract play an important role in speech perception and production. Imitation of speech across conversational partners is a natural consequence of the close connection between perception and production. Following research that finds imitation in single‐word shadowing, this study paired unacquainted sam...

Coarticulatory acoustic variation is presumed to be caused by temporally overlapping linguistically significant gestures of the vocal tract. The complex acoustic consequences of such gestures can be hypothesized to specify them without recourse to context-sensitive representations of phonetic segments. When the consequences of separate gestures con...

Coarticulatory acoustic variation is presumed to be caused by temporally overlapping linguistically significant gestures of the vocal tract. The complex acoustic consequences of such gestures can specify them without recourse to context‐sensitive representations of phonetic segments. When the consequences of separate gestures converge on a common a...

A general account of auditory perceptual organization has developed in the past 2 decades. It relies on primitive devices akin to the Gestalt principles of organization to assign sensory elements to probable groupings and invokes secondary schematic processes to confirm or to repair the possible organization. Although this conceptualization is inte...

A recent study by Kuhl et al. (1991) found striking perceptual correspondences between vowels and steady tones. Whether subjects experienced spoken vowels, visually presented images of articulating faces producing vowels, or imaginary vowels, they matched the vowel /ɑ/ with a low‐pitch tone, and /i/ with a high‐pitch tone. However, tonal analogs of...

The perceptual organization of speech is a challenge for accounts proposing a two?stage model in which primitive auditory grouping is followed by schematic secondary processes. This difficulty stems from the diversity of acoustic constituents of speech signals, which is attributable in turn to the mechanics of vocal sound production. Primitive mech...