Generalization of spontaneous imitation from nonwords to real words

Abstract

This study reports that English speakers, after shadowing English-like nonwords beginning on /p/ with extended voice onset time, spontaneously shifted their subsequent reading productions of English words converging toward the shadowing targets. The extent of the imitative changes correlated positively with the speakers' declarative memory of the nonwords, but not with the lexical frequency of the produced words. These findings provide evidence for the phoneme-level abstraction in perceptually induced phonetic drifts while they further suggest that the mechanisms underlying phonetic drifts in direct shadowing, and in subsequent productions of words differing from the shadowing targets, may not be identical.