Regional Accent Accommodation in Spontaneous Speech: Evidence for Long-term Accent Change?

Speech communication is a highly interactive process in which speakers actively seek to align themselves with their interlocutors [9]. This study investigates phonetic alignment in spontaneous speech in speakers from two different regional accent backgrounds; Standard Southern British English (SSBE), the prestige accent of British English, and North-East English (NE), a nonstandard accent. Six female pairs of SSBE-NE speakers completed a short preand post-test as well as the Diapix task [2] in mismatched (SSBENE) pairs. Accommodation was investigated using accent ratings. There was some evidence that NE speakers accommodated to SSBE speakers. However, this was limited to a small number of speakers, was dependent on snippet-type (accent neutral or accent revealing) and, in contrast to previous research, did not persist into later talk.