Short-term accommodation as a function of addressee language proficiency
This paper examines patterns of phonetic accommodation as a function of addressee target language proficiency. Specifically, it analyzes short-term adjustments in the articulation of coda consonants /s/, /ɾ/, and /n/ in the speech of eight New York Dominican Spanish speakers during a series of conversations with different addressees – a native speaker and three nonnative Spanish speakers who have varying levels of Spanish proficiency. Results demonstrate that addressee native-speaker status and proficiency play a statistically significant role in both the degree and direction of phonetic accommodation exhibited by the native speaker informants. While the informants converge with both the most- and least-proficient addressees, they initially diverge from the mid-proficient addressee. The study finds that the native speaker informants use overtly-prestigious variants to attune to the academic Spanish of the most-proficient addressees and use covertly-prestigious, emblematic variants with both the mid-proficient and native speaker addressees to demonstrate outgroup and ingroup membership, respectively.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Accommodation
- 2.2Dominican Spanish
- 2.2.1Final /s/
- 2.2.2Final /ɾ/
- 2.2.3Final /n/
- 2.4Language ideology and covert prestige
- 3.Methods
- 3.1Participants
- 3.1.1Informants
- 3.1.2Addressees
- 3.2Data collection
- 3.3Data analysis
- 3.4Research questions
- 4.Results
- 4.1Accommodation and addressee native/nonnative status
- 4.2Accommodation and addressee Spanish proficiency
- 4.3Prestige and markedness
- 4.4Tracking short-term accommodation
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
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Ulbrich, Christiane
2024.
Phonetic Accommodation on the Segmental and the Suprasegmental Level of Speech in Native–Non-Native Collaborative Tasks.
Language and Speech 67:2
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