Women*Standardness: The Phonetic Accommodation of Dutch-speaking Women to Different English Varieties

Phonetic accommodation, also known as adaptation, convergence, entrainment or alignment, is a process that takes place when a speaker modifies aspects of their speech to adjust to their interlocutor during a conversational encounter (Burin & Ballier, 2017). Convergence has been comprehensively examined in recent decades and particularly included L1 male and female participants, with much of the literature reporting women’s higher sensitivity to the context encircling adaptation (Ruch and de Benito, 2023). This experimental design has left L2 speakers as an understudied group in the field. Additionally, standard varieties are the default choice in the experiments. The aim of this research is to investigate accommodation among female Dutch L2E speakers employing different standard and non-standard features (GB Palm /ɑː/, Scottish GOAT /o(ː)/, English fricative /th/, and fundamental frequency). In addition, the participants rated these two accents in terms of pleasantness, familiarity...Show morePhonetic accommodation, also known as adaptation, convergence, entrainment or alignment, is a process that takes place when a speaker modifies aspects of their speech to adjust to their interlocutor during a conversational encounter (Burin & Ballier, 2017). Convergence has been comprehensively examined in recent decades and particularly included L1 male and female participants, with much of the literature reporting women’s higher sensitivity to the context encircling adaptation (Ruch and de Benito, 2023). This experimental design has left L2 speakers as an understudied group in the field. Additionally, standard varieties are the default choice in the experiments. The aim of this research is to investigate accommodation among female Dutch L2E speakers employing different standard and non-standard features (GB Palm /ɑː/, Scottish GOAT /o(ː)/, English fricative /th/, and fundamental frequency). In addition, the participants rated these two accents in terms of pleasantness, familiarity and prestige. The results show that exposure to the accents leads to phonetic accommodation in some of the target features. However, the correlations between the acoustic behaviour and the attitudinal components were not significant. The results are discussed considering different accommodation theories in the social and cognitive domains, and a thorough examination is performed to understand the acoustic behaviour of the participants.Show less

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Women*Standardness: The Phonetic Accommodation of Dutch-speaking Women to Different English Varieties