The effects of talker variability on phonetic accommodation

This paper compares spontaneous phonetic accommodation in high and low variability talker conditions. If multi-talker processing is a kind of increased cognitive load, we predict an increase in imitation in the low variability contexts. Our results suggest that, indeed, phonetic accommodation is greater in low variability contexts, but that this higher level of accommodation is moderated as perceptual experiences unfold in the task. That is, while phonetic accommodation in the low variability context stays relatively constant across the task, participants in the high variability context imitate less across the course of the experiment.