Spontaneous phonetic imitation -the phenomenon where interacting talkers come to be more similar-sounding -may be an important mechanism in dialect convergence and historical sound change.Recent research has been concerned with whether spontaneous imitation is an automatic (and hence unavoidable) process, or whether it is consciously mediated by social factors (e.g., Giles and Coupland 1991, Goldinger 1998, Pickering and Garrod 2004, Pardo 2006).Recently, Nielsen (2008) suggests that imitation of VOT can be influenced by abstract linguistic knowledge as well.This dissertation presents the result from a project that investigated phonetic imitation of vowels.The results show that talkers accommodate on the first and second formants of the model talker in the task, but that not all vowels are imitated to a significant degree.In this study of American English, only the low vowels /A/ and /æ/ exhibit strong imitation effects, and this effect lies primarily within the F1 dimension.I argue that this is due to the increased repertoire of production variants Lastly, thanks to the state of California for my education and sustainable agriculture; to The Current at Minnesota Public Radio for streaming online; and, to the cities of Berkeley and Oakland for having beautiful weather, year-round farmers' markets, and well-maintained tennis courts.
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