Imitation of phrases in conversational speech

Linguistically significant gestures of the vocal tract play an important role in speech perception and production. Imitation of speech across conversational partners is a natural consequence of the close connection between perception and production. Following research that finds imitation in single‐word shadowing, this study paired unacquainted same‐sex talkers in a conversational task designed to induce repetition of key phrases across partners. Immediately repeated items were assessed for imitative fidelity by asking a separate set of listeners to choose the more similar item in an AXB task that compared the sample item from one talker (X) with a read and a repeated item from the other talker (A/B). In general, listeners chose the repeated over the read item as more similar to X. Additionally, read items that were sampled immediately after the conversation hindered a listener’s ability to choose the repeated item more so than items read long before the conversation. Other effects related to the timing o...