Talker‐specific accent: Can speech alignment reveal idiolectic influences during the perception of accented speech?

Listeners use talker‐specific (idiolectic) information to help them perceive and remember speech [e.g., Goldinger, J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. 22, 1166–1183 (1998)]. However, recent research has shown that idiolectic information is not as helpful when listeners hear accented speech [e.g., Sidaras et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125, 5 (2009)]. It could be that listeners fail to encode idiolectic information when perceiving accented speech. To examine whether idiolectic is still encoded, experiments tested if subjects would display speech alignment to specific accented models. Speech alignment is the tendency to imitate another talker and can occur when shadowing heard speech [e.g., Goldinger, Psychol. Rev. 105, 251 (1998)]. Native English subjects were asked to shadow a Chinese‐ or Spanish‐accented model producing English words. Raters then judged whether the shadowed tokens were more similar in pronunciation to those of a shadowed model or of a different models with the same accent. In a second experiment, raters judged whether shadowed tokens were more similar in accent to those of (unshadowed) models with the same or a different accent. Preliminary results reveal that subjects align to the shadowed model, suggesting that idiolect is still encoded. Subjects also show moderate alignment to accent.