If you’ve ever caught yourself talking to someone and thinking, “Gosh, I sound just like them,” that could be a sign that you’re engrossed in the conversation or the task at hand.
As a new study shows, the same applies to solving puzzles in an immersive virtual gaming environment.
Over the years, researchers have found that when two people are discussing an enticing topic, the sounds of their speech tend to converge.
Without prompting, speakers may inadvertently start saying certain words like the other person. They can also change the syntax of their sentences to better suit their interlocutor, or change their pronunciation to suit each other.
Numerous experiments have shown that phonetic mimicry, or phonetic convergence, is a dominant feature of human speech.
But these changes seem to subtly differ depending on the content and context of a conversation, including the gender, race, and conversational role of the speakers, as well as the goal of the overall chat.
2018 Experimenters found that when speakers engage deeply with a task – in this particular case, dictating the colors of certain objects in the video game Minecraft to a partner – they emphasize words differently than simply reading colors from a boring old computer screen.
This leaves open the possibility that the goal of a task and the level of engagement of the participants can influence the sound of a person’s speech.
The new study by US researchers adds to the literature by expanding on the 2018 video game experiment.
The authors of the new study wanted to examine how language production changes when a task is highly engaging and involves a conversation partner, as opposed to collaborating on a rather boring task.
The researchers paired 52 native English speakers. These pairs then had to complete a series of tasks together.
Speaker A had to help his partner, Speaker B, who was sitting in an adjacent room, navigate a colorful room Minecraft Scene with target words laid out in the virtual maze that both participants could see on their respective computer screens.
In the less engaging task, Speaker A simply had to read words on a screen aloud to Speaker B, who then selected the correct words on his screen.
Ultimately, the more engaging the task, the more convergence the researchers heard in speaker A’s and speaker B’s speech.
“For example, imagine Talker A has a longer production than his partner Talker B at the beginning of an interaction,” the authors said explain.
“If speaker A shortened his productions over the course of the experiment, then this would be taken as evidence that speaker A was converging towards speaker B. Likewise, if speaker B lengthened his productions over the course of the experiment, this would be taken as evidence that speaker B was converging to speaker A.”
The study suggests that a highly engaging conversation leads to more imitation. Speakers in the experiment were more likely to adjust their speech to their partner’s sounds when their attention was more focused on a game.
This suggests that phonetic convergence could be a way for people to create synergy with each other and reduce the chance of being misunderstood.
Like many before it, the study is limited in that it focuses only on native English speakers and specific acoustic characteristics of the language. The sample size was also too small to distinguish the more subtle acoustic changes that can occur during a conversation.
“It’s one thing to focus on volume, but on a linguistic level, other things happen, like using words that someone doesn’t normally use.” admits Communications scholar Navin Viswanathan from Pennsylvania State University.
It must also be noted that in the current study, the high engagement task resulted in significantly more conversations between partners overall. This means that the speakers in the video game scenario may simply have had more opportunity to learn and mimic the nuances of their partner’s speech than they did in the easier task.
More studies are needed to examine how language length may ultimately affect language convergence, but these early results suggest that mimicry is not always mockery.
Good or bad, the voices of others can easily rub off on us.
The study was published in voice communication.
