Effects of Gender and Language Proficiency on Phonetic Accommodation in Chinese EFL Learners

Phonetic accommodation is ubiquitous in cross-linguistic/cultural speech communication. The present study examined the effects of gender and language proficiency on phonetic accommodation in Chinese EFL learners. Five vowels /i/, /u/, /æ/, /ɑ/ and /ʌ/ were embedded in a pair of syllables /hVt/ and /hVd/ to compose ten target words. Three groups of Chinese EFL learners differing in the level of English language proficiency (i.e., elementary, intermediate, and advanced) participated in the experiment. To elicit spontaneous conversational speech, a Diapix task embedded with all ten target words was conducted between each participant and a model talker who was a native speaker of American English. Also, each participant read aloud the ten words before and after the Diapix task. Phonetic accommodation was measured by acoustic analysis of vowel duration and formants. For vowel duration, the higher-proficiency learners converged more than the lower-proficiency ones. For vowel formants, a significant interaction effect was found between gender and language proficiency, i.e., females converged less than males in the advanced learners, whereas females converged more than males in the lower-proficiency learners.