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The Influence of Ambient Speech on Adult Speech Productions through Unintentional Imitation

Abstract This paper deals with the influence of ambient speech on individual speechproductions. A methodological framework is defined to gather the experimentaldata necessary to feed computer models simulating self-organisation in phonologicalsystems. Two experiments were carried out. Experiment 1 was run onFrench native speakers from two regiolects of Belgium: two from Liège and twofrom Brussels. When exposed to the way of speaking of the other regiolect vialoudspeakers, the speakers of one regiolect produced vowels that were significantlydifferent from their typical realisations, and significantly closer to the wayof speaking specific of the other regiolect. Experiment 2 achieved a replication ofthe results for 8 Mons speakers hearing a Liège speaker. A significant part of theimitative effect remained up to 10 min after the end of the exposure to the otherregiolect productions. As a whole, the results suggest that: (i) imitation occursautomatically and unintentionally, (ii) the modified realisations leave a memorytrace, in which case the mechanism may be better defined as ‘mimesis’ than as‘imitation’. The potential effects of multiple imitative speech interactions on soundchange are discussed in this paper, as well as the implications for a general theoryof phonetic implementation and phonetic representation.