Interpreting acoustic measures of imitation in word shadowing

Word shadowing tasks, in which a participant repeats words aloud after a pre-recorded model talker in a laboratory setting, elicit imitation of the model talker’s speech by the shadowing participant, even in the absence of explicit instructions to imitate. However, the nature of this imitation varies substantially within and across shadowers, model talkers, and linguistic features. Recent research has considered this variation in imitation in word shadowing to address how acoustic measures of imitation in these tasks should be interpreted. The results demonstrate (1) imitation of phonetic and phonological structure in vowel shifts and intonation contours, in addition to direct imitation of acoustic formant frequencies and f0; (2) more imitation of non-stereotyped social variants than of stereotyped social variants; and (3) both convergence to overall production patterns and synchrony with token-by-token variability in the speech of the model talker. Together, these results suggest a strong speech perception-production link that operates in real time and is mediated by linguistic and social representations.