Phonetic convergence among reality television contestants
Previous work has shown that in short-term laboratory settings, aspects of one’s speech can change under exposure to the speech of others, and that this change is mediated by social variables. The implicit hypothesis is that phonetic convergence can help explain dialect formation and social stratification of speech. A link between laboratory results and community-level change is needed to show that convergence is a possible source of socially stratified change. We address this question using data from reality television. Our results show significant longitudinal change in voice onset time for four speakers over 13 weeks, mediated by social interaction.Speakers sacrifice some (of the) precision in conveyed meaning to accommodate robust communication
The process of encoding an intended meaning into a linguistic utterance is well-known to be affected by production pressures. We present corpus data suggesting that the choice between even two seemingly non-meaning-equivalent forms as in (1a) and (1b) can be affected by speakers’ preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal (Uniform Information Density (UID), Jaeger 2006). This suggests that even when two forms do not encode the same (but a similar enough) message, speakers may sacrifice precision in meaning for increased processing efficiency.(1a) Alex ate some chard.
(1b) Alex ate some of the chard.
(1b) Alex ate some of the chard.
