The Social Conditioning of Selective Phonetic Convergence

This study examines how partner dialect background, sociolinguistic awareness, length of residence, and gender influence phonetic accommodation in a regional vowel merger context. Through acoustic analysis of conversational interviews, the findings reveal that spousal interaction provides a dense, intimate, and sustained source of dialectal input. However, convergence toward local vowel patterns is not a mechanical consequence of exposure but is selectively modulated by speakers’ awareness of the feature’s social markedness. The results further show that high-frequency lexical items with strong social associations resist convergence, indicating that usage frequency alone cannot fully explain patterns of phonetic accommodation. Rather, phonetic realization patterns reflect the interaction between frequency and socially activated identity cues. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that phonetic accommodation functions as a socially filtered and feature-specific process shaped by exposure dynamics, social awareness, and identity positioning, rather than by contact frequency alone.