2022 Volume 26 Issue 1 Pages 13-26
Convergence towards a surrounding speaker plays an important role in language acquisition in nature. It is also observed under a lab setting, and has been explored using listening or shadowing experiments in previous literature. The current study tests whether these two types of tasks cause different consequences. 16 Japanese English learners participated in either a listening or shadowing experiment, and imitated an American English speaker. Their productions of /p/ and /ɑ/ were acoustically analysed. Our statistical results suggest that a shadowing group imitates the model stimuli better with respect to /p/ than a listening group, whereas a listening group converges towards the model speaker further in relation to /ɑ/ than a shadowing group. This may be interpreted to mean that speech production is not only influenced by recently stored exemplars but also “awareness” of non-native speech sounds.
