Phonetic Convergence to Native and Non-native English Accents by Dutch English Speakers.
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2022-08-24
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en
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Phonetic convergence is a process in which two interlocutors will adapt their accents to each other throughout a conversation. This has been investigated before through various methods, but this study attempts to close a research gap surrounding phonetic convergence to native and non-native accents by non-native participants and the role that the attitudes towards these accents play in this. For this experiment, English speakers with Dutch as a native language were exposed to three different accents, two native English accents (American and British) and one non-native English accent (Dutch) in an immediate shadowing experiment. The voice onset time of word-initial plosives of these participants was compared for the three shadowing conditions and a baseline measurement to assess the amount of convergence that took place. It was found that the participants only converged to the British accent and not to the American and Dutch accents. The convergence to the British accent and the lack of convergence to the Dutch accent could be explained by the attitude towards the accents, but the lack of convergence to the American accent could not. Other factors such as the design of the task and the voice onset time of the stimuli were provided as alternative explanations. In general, it is difficult to generalise these findings over different populations of non-native speakers and different contexts since findings of convergence in a shadowing experiment are not always equivalent to convergence under different conditions. Overall, these findings support a hybrid account of phonetic convergence, since convergence was found in an immediate shadowing task but the influence of a social factor (accent attitudes) was concluded as well.
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Faculteit der Letteren