The relation between perceptual retuning and articulatory restructuring: Individual differences in accommodating a novel phonetic variant

When language users accommodate a novel phonetic variant, they adjust their perceptual and articulatory spaces in listener- and speaker-specific ways. Motivated by the centrality of accommodation and the perception-production relation to theories of phonetics and sound change, this study tests the hypothesis that individuals who are adept at perceptually retuning for a novel variant will be more accurate imitators of that form. In perceptual eye-tracking and spontaneous imitation ultrasound-imaging tasks, 37 American English participants were exposed to a talker’s novel raised /æ/ before /ɡ/ (bag), and to their familiar unraised /æk/ (back) and /eɪk/ (bake). Consistent with the hypothesis, results showed that the more participants showed perceptual facilitation (i.e., used raised /æ(ɡ)/ to disambiguate back-bag trials), the more they imitated raised /æ(ɡ)/. Perceptual retuning, though, did not predict articulatory restructuring: imitators produced not context-dependent raising, but more general “imitative” raising. For theories of sound change, the findings provide circumscribed support for especially adept perceptual adapters to an innovation having the potential to be strong disseminators of that variant. For theories of accommodation, findings point toward the importance of studying imitation of a targeted variant in the broader context of how talkers and imitators situate that variant in relation to phonetically similar forms.