Specificity and abstractness of VOT imitation

The imitation paradigm (Goldinger, 1998) has shown that speakers shift their production phonetically in the direction of the imitated speech, indicating the use of episodic traces in speech perception. Although word-level specificity of imitation has been shown, it is unknown whether imitation also can take place with sub-lexical units. By using a modified imitation paradigm, the current study investigated: (1) the generalizability of phonetic imitation at phoneme and sub-phonemic levels, (2) word-level specificity through acoustic measurements of speech production: and (3) automaticity of phonetic imitation and its sensitivity to linguistic structure. The sub-phonemic feature manipulated in the experiments was VOT on the phoneme /p/. The results revealed that participants produced significantly longer VOTs after being exposed to target speech with extended VOTs. Furthermore, this modeled feature was generalized to new instances of the target phoneme /p/ and the new phoneme /k/, indicating that sub-lexical units are involved in phonetic imitation. The data also revealed that lexical frequency had an effect on the degree of imitation. On the other hand, target speech with reduced VOT was not imitated, indicating that phonetic imitation is phonetically selective. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.