UMR 7309, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS Aix-en-Provence, France ; Brain and Language Research Institute, Aix-Marseille Université Aix-en-Provence, France.
Front Psychol. 2013 Jun 21;4:346. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00346. eCollection 2013.
Phonetic imitation, also called phonetic convergence, is currently at the heart of numerous investigations since it can inform us on both the nature of lexical representations and the link between production and perception processes in spoken language communication. A task that has been largely used to study phonetic imitation is the shadowing task, in which participants merely listen to and repeat isolated words. In this study, we examined the extent to which the phonetic convergence effect found when participants shadow auditory tokens, is an imitation of the speaker. We thus compared the phonetic convergence effect observed in a shadowing task to that observed when participants were explicitly instructed to imitate the productions they were exposed to. Although the phonetic convergence effect was greater when participants intentionally imitated the speaker's productions, shadowing and imitation instructions led to the same degree of convergence in a post-exposure task. Hence, the convergence effect found in a shadowing task and that found in an imitation task seem to share a general mechanism which is automatic and which taps into the long-term representations of the words in memory. At a more theoretical level, our results reinforce the claim that detailed auditory traces associated with perceived words are stored in memory and are later used for production.
语音模仿，也称为语音趋同，目前是众多研究的核心，因为它可以让我们了解词汇表征的本质，以及口语交际中产生和感知过程之间的联系。一项被广泛用于研究语音模仿的任务是跟读任务，在该任务中，参与者只需听并重复孤立的单词。在这项研究中，我们研究了参与者在跟读语音令牌时发现的语音趋同效应在多大程度上是对说话者的模仿。因此，我们将跟读任务中观察到的语音趋同效应与参与者被明确指示模仿所接触到的语音时观察到的趋同效应进行了比较。尽管当参与者有意模仿说话者的发音时，语音趋同效应更大，但在暴露后任务中，跟读和模仿指令导致了相同程度的趋同。因此，在跟读任务中发现的趋同效应和在模仿任务中发现的趋同效应似乎共享一个自动的通用机制，该机制利用了记忆中单词的长期表征。在更理论的层面上，我们的结果加强了这样一种观点，即与感知到的单词相关的详细听觉痕迹被存储在记忆中，然后用于产生。
