Accommodation can lead to innovated variation

The initiation of sound change requires the emergence of innovated variants. One possible source of innovated variants is non-faithful transference of linguistic features during accommodation to a received speech signal. If the subphonemic cues associated with a phonological contrast are realized differently in an accommodating speaker's speech than in both the speaker's previous speech and in the signal to which they are accommodating, the resulting difference in phonetic realization may constitute a new variation. In this paper I argue that this sort of difference logically must happen in accommodation, at least for some speakers along some phonetic dimensions. I then report the results of a study demonstrating that such phonetic divergence in accommodation does happen in a laboratory environment, indicating that accommodation is a potential source of new phonetic variants. I conclude by situating these findings within extant work on sound change. To the extent that populations of individuals evince varying degrees of nonfaithful transference of these cues, this study provides evidence for a potential approach to the actuation problem (Weinreich et al. 1968).