Phonetic imitation is not conditioned by preservation of phonological contrast but by perceptual salience

This study addresses disagreement between previous studies about the hypothesis that phonetic imitation does not occur if it would threaten a phonological contrast. Using a within-subject pretest-shadowingposttest design, we tested imitability of reduction and extension of prevoicing and vowel duration in Czech, a vowel-quantity language with prevoicedvs-unaspirated stop contrasts. Results showed imitation of extended but not of reduced prevoicing. This is compatible with the contrast-preservation hypothesis, but may also be ascribed to the lower perceptual salience of prevoicing reduction than its extension in the presence of other voicing cues. In contrast, reducing duration of a Czech long vowel is salient to native listeners. Indeed, both directions of (natural-sounding) vowel duration manipulation were imitated, even though reduction decreased the distance between phonologically long and short categories. We conclude that contrast preservation does not necessarily preclude imitation and that the likelihood of imitation of a given feature depends on its perceptual salience.