title: Is speech alignment to talkers or tasks?
abstract: Speech alignment, or the tendency of individuals to subtly imitate each other's speaking styles, is often assessed by comparing a subject's baseline and shadowed utterances to a model's utterances, often through perceptual ratings. These types of comparisons provide information about the occurrence of a change in subject's speech, but they do not indicate that this change is toward the specific shadowed model. In three experiments, we investigated whether alignment is specific to a shadowed model. Experiment 1 involved the classic baseline-to-shadowed comparison, to confirm that subjects did, in fact, sound more like their model when they shadowed, relative to any preexisting similarities between a subject and a model. Experiment 2 tested whether subjects' utterances sounded more similar to the model whom they had shadowed or to another, unshadowed model. In Experiment 3, we examined whether subjects' utterances sounded more similar to the model whom they had shadowed or to another subject who had shadowed a different model. The results of all experiments revealed that subjects sounded more similar to the model whom they had shadowed. This suggests that shadowing-based speech alignment is not just a change, but a change in the direction of the shadowed model, specifically.
authors.affiliation: University of California, Riverside, California, USA.
authors.forename: Rachel M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Kauyumari
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sanchez
authors.forename: Lawrence D
authors.initials: LD
authors.lastname: Rosenblum
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
references.citation: J Neurophysiol. 1995 Jun;73(6):2608-11
references.pmid: 7666169
references.citation: Cognition. 2008 Oct;109(1):168-73
references.pmid: 18805522
references.citation: J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2010 Apr;53(2):262-72
references.pmid: 20220027
references.citation: J Phon. 2011 Jan;39(1):18-38
references.pmid: 23418398
references.citation: Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009 Apr;10(4):295-302
references.pmid: 19277052
references.citation: Nature. 2000 Dec 21-28;408(6815):927-8
references.pmid: 11140668
references.citation: Trends Cogn Sci. 2009 Mar;13(3):110-4
references.pmid: 19223222
references.citation: Atten Percept Psychophys. 2010 Nov;72(8):2254-64
references.pmid: 21097867
references.citation: J Mem Lang. 2003 Oct;49(3):396-413
references.pmid: 20622982
references.citation: Eur J Neurosci. 2002 Jan;15(2):399-402
references.pmid: 11849307
references.citation: J Pers Soc Psychol. 1996 Jun;70(6):1231-40
references.pmid: 8667163
references.citation: Percept Psychophys. 2004 Apr;66(3):422-9
references.pmid: 15283067
references.citation: Psychon Bull Rev. 2004 Aug;11(4):716-22
references.pmid: 15581123
references.citation: Atten Percept Psychophys. 2010 Aug;72(6):1614-25
references.pmid: 20675805
references.citation: Psychol Rev. 1998 Apr;105(2):251-79
references.pmid: 9577239
references.citation: Perception. 2011;40(12):1457-66
references.pmid: 22474764
references.citation: Neuropsychologia. 2007 Feb 1;45(3):608-15
references.pmid: 16698051
references.citation: J Mem Lang. 2008 Nov;59(4):434-446
references.pmid: 19884961
references.citation: Psychol Res. 2001;65(1):3-14
references.pmid: 11505611
references.citation: J Acoust Soc Am. 2006 Apr;119(4):2382-93
references.pmid: 16642851