Prosodic Accommodation by French Speakers to a Non-native Interlocutor

On-line accommodation to an interlocutor is often cited as an explanation for phonetic variation. Prosodic evidence for speakers’ accommodation was investigated in a task that was expected to favor modification: giving directions to a nonnative interlocutor, compared to the same task with a native interlocutor. Ten native speakers of French were recorded in spontaneous conversation in the two conditions. With the non-native, they used a significantly greater F0 range, and segmental modifications compatible with a more emphatic speech style, but did not modify speech rate or utterance duration. These results suggest that accommodations can include both languagespecific and universal properties, and that speakers can selectively implement different ways of accommodating.