A dynamic approach to phonetic change

Investigations into phonetic accommodation reveal that convergence in interlocutors’ phonetic forms is typical. However, there is considerable betweenspeaker variation in the extent of this convergence. In this investigation, I propose that some of this variation can be attributed to language-specific differences in articulatory timing stability (VoiceOnset-Time) and that a dynamical systems approach gives a better account of such findings than extant theories/models. Spanish-English and KoreanEnglish bilinguals, and monolingual English controls completed word shadowing tasks to induce phonetic accommodation and word reading tasks to measure accommodation. The results confirm that betweenlanguage differences in articulatory timing stability influence the likelihood of phonetic change and that a dynamical approach provides the best account of the effect.