Imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasality across words and time

ABSTRACT

We investigated phonetic imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasality using an adapted shadowing paradigm in which participants produced a printed word (target) after hearing a different word (prime). Two versions of primes with nasal codas were used: primes with a natural degree of vowel nasality and hypernasalised primes. The version of the prime participants heard varied, whether consistent with their past experience with nasality from the talker or inconsistent, as well as the duration of delay between prime and target. People spontaneously modify coarticulatory nasality to resemble that demonstrated in the prime they were exposed to. Furthermore, this imitation also reflects the degree of nasality demonstrated by overall experience with the speaker’s vowels. The influence of past experience on imitation increases with increased delay between prime and target. Imitation of another speaker appears to involve tracking general articulatory properties about the speaker, and not solely what was specific to the most recent experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Phonetic imitation
• coarticulation
• memory
• cross-word generalisation

Acknowledgements

We thank Sam Beer for help with the stimulus recordings. We are grateful for the detailed comments provided by three reviewers and by editor Bob McMurray.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) [grant number R01-HD073258].