It has long been assumed that imitation in conversational interaction
affects the phonetic characteristics of the utterances produced by both
talkers. Recent work has indeed shown that perceived similarity in
pronunciation between talkers increases over the course of the
interaction and persists beyond its conclusion. This has been taken as
indicating that the representations associated with words in the mental
lexicon for each talker may dynamically evolve during conversation under
the influence of the other talker's speech patterns, and retain
the traces of that influence once the conversation has ended. This finding
seems difficult to reconcile with standard abstractionist models of speech
production and speech processing, and provides support for the existence of
an episodic-memory component, which may, however, be combined with abstract
phonological representations. Thus, phonetic convergence has important
implications for the current debate on how words are represented in the mental
lexicon, and may be used as a probe for exploring the nature of these
lexical representations.
In this talk, I will present a number of studies recently conducted on
different varieties of French in that domain.