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Speech alignment, or the tendency of individuals to subtly imitate each other's speaking styles, is often assessed by comparing a subject's baseline and shadowed utterances to a model's utterances, often through perceptual ratings. These types of comparisons provide information about the occurrence of a change in subject's speech, but they do not indicate that this change is toward the specific shadowed model. In three experiments, we investigated whether alignment is specific to a shadowed model. Experiment 1 involved the classic baseline-to-shadowed comparison, to confirm that subjects did, in fact, sound more like their model when they shadowed, relative to any preexisting similarities between a subject and a model. Experiment 2 tested whether subjects' utterances sounded more similar to the model whom they had shadowed or to another, unshadowed model. In Experiment 3, we examined whether subjects' utterances sounded more similar to the model whom they had shadowed or to another subject who had shadowed a different model. The results of all experiments revealed that subjects sounded more similar to the model whom they had shadowed. This suggests that shadowing-based speech alignment is not just a change, but a change in the direction of the shadowed model, specifically.

Rosenblum, Miller, and Sanchez (Psychological Science, 18, 392-396, 2007) found that subjects first trained to lip-read a particular talker were then better able to perceive the auditory speech of that same talker, as compared with that of a novel talker. This suggests that the talker experience a perceiver gains in one sensory modality can be transferred to another modality to make that speech easier to perceive. An experiment was conducted to examine whether this cross-sensory transfer of talker experience could occur (1) from auditory to lip-read speech, (2) with subjects not screened for adequate lipreading skill, (3) when both a familiar and an unfamiliar talker are presented during lipreading, and (4) for both old (presentation set) and new words. Subjects were first asked to identify a set of words from a talker. They were then asked to perform a lipreading task from two faces, one of which was of the same talker they heard in the first phase of the experiment. Results revealed that subjects who lip-read from the same talker they had heard performed better than those who lip-read a different talker, regardless of whether the words were old or new. These results add further evidence that learning of amodal talker information can facilitate speech perception across modalities and also suggest that this information is not restricted to previously heard words.

Purpose: Speech shadowing experiments were conducted to test whether alignment (inadvertent imitation) to voice onset time (VOT) can be influenced by visual speech information. Method: Experiment 1 examined whether alignment would occur to auditory /pa/ syllables manipulated to have 3 different VOTs. Nineteen female participants were asked to listen to 180 syllables over headphones and to say each syllable out loud quickly and clearly. In Experiment 2, visual speech tokens composed of a face articulating /pa/ syllables at 2 different rates were dubbed onto the audio /pa/ syllables of Experiment 1. Sixteen new female participants were asked to listen to and watch (over a video monitor) 180 syllables and to say each syllable out loud quickly and clearly. Results: Results of Experiment 1 showed that the 3 VOTs of the audio /pa/ stimuli influenced the VOTs of the participants' produced syllables. Results of Experiment 2 revealed that both the visible syllable rate and audio VOT of the audiovisual /pa/ stimuli influenced the VOTs of the participants' produced syllables. Conclusion: These results show that, like auditory speech, visual speech information can induce speech alignment to a phonetically relevant property of an utterance.

Purpose: Speech shadowing experiments were conducted to test whether alignment (inadvertent imitation) to voice onset time (VOT) can be influenced by visual speech information. Method: Experiment 1 examined whether alignment would occur to auditory /pa/ syllables manipulated to have 3 different VOTs. Nineteen female participants were asked to listen to 180 syllables over headphones and to say each syllable out loud quickly and clearly. In Experiment 2, visual speech tokens composed of a face articulating /pa/ syllables at 2 different rates were dubbed onto the audio /pa/ syllables of Experiment 1. Sixteen new female participants were asked to listen to and watch (over a video monitor) 180 syllables and to say each syllable out loud quickly and clearly. Results: Results of Experiment 1 showed that the 3 VOTs of the audio /pa/ stimuli influenced the VOTs of the participants' produced syllables. Results of Experiment 2 revealed that both the visible syllable rate and audio VOT of the audiovisual /pa/ stimuli influenced the VOTs of the participants' produced syllables. Conclusion: These results show that, like auditory speech, visual speech information can induce speech alignment to a phonetically relevant property of an utterance. KEY WORDS: speech, alignment, audiovisual stimuli, lipreading, Alignment is the unconscious and spontaneous tendency people have to subtly imitate the person with whom they are speaking. Interlocutors tend to align to each other's speaking style (e.g., prosody, [...]

This paper presents results from an experiment designed to test whether New Zealand listeners' perceptual adaptation towards Australian English is mediated by their attitudes toward Australia, which we attempted to manipulate experimentally. Participants were put into one of three conditions, where they either read good facts about Australia, bad facts about Australia, or no facts about Australia (the control). Participants performed the same listening task - matching the vowel in a sentence to a vowel in a synthesized continuum - before and after reading the facts. The results indicate that participants who read the bad facts shifted their perception of KIT to more Australianlike tokens relative to the control group, while the participants who read good facts shifted their perception of KIT to more NZ-like tokens relative to the control group. This result shows that perceptual adaptation towards a dialect can occur in the absence of a speaker of that dialect and that these adaptations are subject to a listener's (manipulated) affect towards the primed dialect region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]