Tifani Biro
Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation
University of Pennsylvania

Join us for a hybrid ILST Seminar in Room 401B, 3401 Walnut Street, and over Zoom.

Contextual Influences on Speech Adaptation

Interlocutors show increased similarity in their speech produced during conversation in a type of speech adaptation known as phonetic convergence. Talker factors like sex, race, and conversational role appear to influence convergence. Yet, findings vary in how these factors impact convergence and which acoustic features talkers converge on. There is evidence that task differences may contribute to this variability. This points to a more general challenge in studying speech communication: the context in which speech phenomena are studied influences the generalizability of our findings. In turn, the theories and models we make to explain speech phenomena are limited by those contexts.