Intra-individual Variation in Language

Alexander Werth, Lars Bülow, Simone E. Pfenninger, Markus Schiegg

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110743128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume offers several empirical, methodological, and theoretical approaches to the study of observable variation within individuals on various linguistic levels. With a focus on German varieties, the chapters provide answers on the following questions (inter alia):
Which linguistic and extra-linguistic factors explain intra-individual variation? Is there observable intra-individual variation that cannot be explained by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors? Can group-level results be generalised to individual language usage and vice versa? Is intra-individual variation indicative of actual patterns of language change? How can intra-individual variation be examined in historical data?
Consequently, the various theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches in this volume offer a better understanding of the meaning of intra-individual variation for patterns of language development, language variation and change.
The inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the volume is an exciting new frontier, and the results of the studies in this book provide a wealth of new findings as well as challenges to some of the existing findings and assumptions regarding the nature of intra-individual variation.

Part I: Phonetic-phonological dimension

Everyone Is Different, So Everyone Is the Same – Intra-individual Variation in Second Language Acquisition

Christiane Ulbrich

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an analysis of production data obtained from twelve female native Spanish learners of L2 German recorded during a collaborative map-task in order to investigate phonetic accommodation. Phonetic accommodation is a process by which speakers increasingly select variants produced by an interlocutor in conversation. The focus of the study is on the realisation of neutralisation of final voicing contrast in plosives, a process found in German but not in Spanish according to existing contrastive analysis. Two main objectives were pursued in the study: (i) whether phonetic accommodation varies depending on the proficiency level of the participants as well as that of the interlocutor and (ii) whether individual subsegmental characteristics are affected differently. The findings show that both proficiency level and interlocutor influence the degree of accommodation. The findings also reveal that not all analysed subsegmental cues show comparable accommodation effects, and that the realisation of individual subphonemic cues leads to a high degree of inter- and intra-speaker variation. The greatest accommodation effects were found in conversations of highly proficient, non-native participants with a native speaker of German but also with a highly proficient non-native interlocutor. Participants with lower proficiency levels showed comparatively fewer accommodation effects. The degree of intra-individual variation seems to vary depending on proficiency level, in that the distribution of target-like and non-target-like realisations differs between L2 speakers of high and low proficiency. However, both target-like and non-target-like realisations occur in the speech samples of all L2 speakers.

Keywords: phonetic accommodation, neutralisation of final voicing contrast, proficiency level, collaborative map-task,

1 Introduction

Intra-individual variation (IAV) in the realisation of phonetic details or subphonemic cues as well as in the representation of phonological categories has frequently been documented in interactions of multilingual individuals (cf. Flege 1995; Fabiano-Smith et al. 2010; Jiang 2010). Such variation can occur because of automatic and spontaneous or intentional and conscious imitation of perceived characteristics in an interlocutor’s or a model speaker’s speech. That means the individual produces different variants in the course of a single conversation resulting from perceptually guided changes in speech production. The variation occurs at any level of speech production and is referred to as speech accommodation (or simply accommodation) (e.g. Tobin et al. 2017). Phonetic accommodation is a subset of speech accommodation that considers accommodation effects at the phonetic level only. A specific case of phonetic accommodation is phonetic drift (Sancier and Fowler 1997), referring to cross-language effects resulting from exposure to a language that an individual is familiar with but not constantly using.¹

Within the field of language acquisition, a phenomenon might be considered a macro-level of accommodation when interlocutors consciously or unconsciously switch the entire language because of insufficient proficiency or volitional discourse strategies in multilingual communications. In addition to psycholinguistic aspects and aspects of communication design, grammatical constraints permitting or prohibiting language switches within and across sentences have also been previously investigated (cf. Myers-Scotton 2002; Clyne 2003; Riehl 2014; Müller 2017). The type of accommodation that is the focus of the present chapter may be considered the micro-level of accommodation. It is concerned with individual linguistic aspects, which have been attested on all linguistic levels (e.g. for syntax see Bock 1986; Gries 2005; for morphology see Trudgill 1986; Dunstan 2010; for semantics (and pragmatics) see Heim 1992; Beaver and Zeevat 2007; Liberman 2012; for lexical choice see Van Baaren et al. 2003; Jacob et al. 2011; for phonetics and phonology see Sancier and Fowler 1997; Pardo 2006; Nilsenová et al. 2009; Fabiano-Smith et al. 2010; Chang 2013; Pardo et al. 2013; Tobin et al. 2017; and for multiple levels of linguistics see Ferrarra 1991). The effects are not limited to oral communication but were also found in text-based communication documented by Schiegg and Sowada (2019, see also Schiegg 2015). The results of Schiegg’s detailed real-time case studies, for instance, show accommodation effects in the handwriting of individual letters and in the use of specific grammatical forms. More recently, similar effects of convergence in written online-communication were documented, in particular, concerning lexical and grammatical choices but also utterance length (e.g. Bunz and Campbell 2004; Scissors et al. 2009; Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. 2011). In addition, facial expression (Bavelas et al. 1986; Hess and Blairy 2001), gestures, body postures and movements (Condon and Sander 1974; Meltzoff and Moore 1977; Maurer and Tindall 1983; Bernieri and Rosenthal 1991; Chartrand and Bargh 1999; Richardson et al. 2007; Shockley et al. 2007) were found to converge between interlocutors.

Accommodation effects have long been known and theorised about, especially in the field of sociolinguistics and variationist linguistics, leading to the establishment of the communication accommodation theory (CAT cf. Giles et al. 1991). Early works focussed on speech patterns that were found to vary depending on interlocutors’ attitudes to discourse-contextual, situational or social factors (Giles 1973; Bourhis and Giles 1977). The analysis emphasised the evaluation of speakers’ competence and social attributes as well as how listeners perceive the speakers’ association with those attributes. Recently, with an i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• What Is Intra-individual Variation in Language?
• Part I: Phonetic-phonological dimension
• Part II: Syntactic-morphological dimension
• Part III: Historical dimension
• Index