Imitation in speech: from sensori-motor integration to the dynamics of conversational interaction – SPIM

In the last few years, a growing number of studies have centered on speech patterns in conversational interaction. A major issue of interest in these studies is the tendency shown by participants in a conversation to imitate each other. Imitation seems to occurs at every level of the conversational exchange, and that includes the phonetic level. Imitative speech behavior is a phenomenon that may be actively exploited by talkers to facilitate conversational interaction. It is consistent with the idea that listeners are sensitive to talker-dependent fine-grained phonetic characteristics, which have an influence on both the dynamics of conversational interaction, and across a longer time range the representations associated with words in memory, when that interaction has ended. This project will provide a contribution that will be both novel and important in several respects. First, and although it has long been assumed that phonetic convergence effects are recurrent in conversational interaction, no study yet has investigated these phenomena in speech in a systematic and extensive manner. To undertake these investigations, we will take an original, cross-disciplinary approach that will aim to cover the many factors that govern imitative speech behavior, from the sensori-motor to the pragmatic level. Large-scale analyses on spontaneous speech corpora will be performed in conjunction with experimental studies with the help of a wide variety of technical and methodological resources developed in our research teams over the years. Our research will shed new light on the relationships that can be established between perception and action in speech, and will in that respect contribute to the work carried out by the GIPSA group in the framework of the PACT theory (Perception-for-Action-Control, see Schwartz et al., 2007). The project will also help identify fine-grained phonetic properties that convey indexical information about the talker's identity in speech. It will have an important bearing on the current debate on the nature of the representations associated with words in the mental lexicon, and on the plasticity of these representations in mature talkers (Dufour, Nguyen & Frauenfelder, 2007). Our project will stand at the interface between phonetics and phonology in seeking to detect the formation of new generic and abstract phonological patterns that may be triggered by phonetic convergence in conversational interaction. It will also aim at studying imitation in speech as a goal-oriented behavior that performs a number of pragmatic functions central to the dynamics of the conversational exchange. In doing so, this project will endeavor to investigate speech patterns in their primary site of occurrence, namely social interaction, in the framework of the conversational analysis framework developed by the ICAR group.