Trajectories of voice onset time in spontaneous speech on reality TV

Do speakers’ accents change from day to day? This paper examines this question through the lens of voice onset time (VOT). We examine whether VOT within individual speakers shows time dependence—daily fluctuations, longer-term time trends, or both—by examining spontaneous speech from 11 English speakers on three months of the reality TV show Big Brother UK. We build statistical models of time dependence in VOT for each speaker, controlling for a range of other factors, and find that all speakers show daily fluctuations in VOT, for both voiced and voiceless stops, while longer-term time trends (weeks–months) are present in about half of cases. Together with previous work, these results suggest that pronunciation (at least VOT) does change from day to day, possibly due to accumulated accommodation effects, but that these shifts often do not accumulate into longer-term change.