Linguistic and social selectivity in phonetic imitation: Evidence from North Korean refugees in Seoul

This study explored if and to what extent North Korean (NK) refugees living in Seoul, South Korea adjusted their pronunciation to the standard Seoul Korean (SK) dialect in an imitation task. To this end, NK and SK speakers participated in a word shadowing task to evaluate acoustic measures of phonetic convergence in vowels. The NK speakers, as a less prestigious group, showed more convergence to the SK model talker than SK speakers to the NK model talker, and convergence was greater in the vowels that could threaten the phonological contrast in SK. The social variables showed a tendency to have null and weak effects in demographic and situational variables, respectively, probably owing to the somewhat long residency of the NK participants. The present findings provide additional evidence that phonetic convergence is mediated by linguistic, and, to a lesser extent, social factors in cross-dialectal accommodation.