University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics

A Study of Rhythm in London: Is Syllable-timing a Feature of Multicultural London English?

Eivind Torgersen et al. — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:52 PDT

Recent work on London English has found innovation in inner city areas, most likely as the outcome of dialect contact. These innovations are shared by speakers of different ethnic backgrounds, and have been identified as features of Multicultural London English (MLE). This study examines whether syllable timing is a feature of MLE, as work on rhythm shows that dialect and language contact may lead to varieties of English becoming more syllable-timed. We hypothesized that MLE speakers would also show suprasegmental innovations, having more syllable-timed rhythm than what has been reported for British English. Narratives as told by teenagers of different ethnic backgrounds, elderly speakers born between 1920 and 1935 and speakers born between 1874 and 1895 were extracted from interviews. The speech was segmented into consonantal and vocalic elements by forced phonemic alignment. Measurements of vocalic nPVI, as an indicator of rhythmic patterns, were calculated. Overall, the inner-London speakers were more syllable-timed than what has been found for British English. The results revealed that young speakers of non-Anglo background were significantly more syllable-timed than young Anglo speakers. The relatively low nPVI for all inner-London speaker groups may indicate the capital’s status as a centre of linguistic innovation and long-standing migration. The results of the present study combined with work on other varieties reinforces the idea that the tendency for English to become more syllable-timed is a global phenomenon fuelled by language and dialect contact.

One /a/ or Two?: Observing a Phonemic Split in Progress in the Southwest of England

Caroline Piercy — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:51 PDT

This paper examines the phonemic status of the vowels in the lexical sets of TRAP, BATH, PALM and START in the English of the southwest of England. In the reference accent RP there are two phonemes; a short front vowel in TRAP and a long back vowel in BATH, START and PALM. In the southwest of England however, some have previously described this contrast as “absent or variable” or “doubtful” (Wells 1982, Hughes, Trudgill and Watt 2005) while others consider there to be a two phoneme system, akin to RP, but differing phonetically (Wakelin 1986). This paper elucidates the status of these vowels using sociolinguistic interview data from 40 speakers in four age groups from locations across Dorset, a representative dialect of the southwest of England.

An acoustic analysis of the quality and crucially the length of 3800 vowel tokens reveals that a phonemic split is in progress in apparent time with one phoneme becoming two. The split and subsequent phonetic changes are occurring in a non-uniform way: the backing of the ‘BATH lexical set’ appears to be proceeding via lexical diffusion whereas the backing of START, appears to be a regular ‘neogrammarian’ sound change. The analysis also revealed that the ‘short /a/’ phoneme could be realised long before many following environments. Common environments and constraints on lengthened /a/ cross-dialectally, for example, the shared preference for a lengthened /a/ in closed syllables raise the possibility that the tensing and raising of short a in New York City English (Labov 1994, Trager 1940) and Philadelphia English (Ferguson 1972) and the occurrence of lengthened /a/ in Australia (Blake 1985) may have their origins in the southwest of England.

Wh-interrogatives in Brazilian Portuguese: The Influence of Common Ground

Livia Oushiro — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:49 PDT

This paper analyzes the influence of common ground (Clark 1996, Stalnaker 2002) on the variable use of Wh-interrogatives in Brazilian Portuguese, in which four different structures are employed with semantic-pragmatic equivalence: (1) Onde você mora? (Where you live?); (2) Onde que você mora? (Where that you live?); (3) Onde é que você mora? (Where is-it that you live?); and (4) Você mora onde? (You live where?) ‘Where do you live?’. Two discourse-pragmatic factor groups are discussed, Type of Question (information, rhetorical, and semi-rhetorical) and Givenness of the Presupposition (when last activated in the conversation, if at all). Results of multivariate analyses contrasting wh-in-situ (4) with all other structures (1−3) show that wh-in-situ is favored by semi-rhetorical questions (.68), for which the current speaker provides an answer, which suggests that they may be part of a strategy for turn-keeping. Further, the more activated the presupposition (in one of the first two preceding clauses), the greater the tendency to employ wh-in-situ (.66). The main argument is that variation in the position of the wh-word is sensitive to the hic et nunc of conversation, as speakers make their conversational contributions and common ground is updated.

Null Subjects in Heritage Languages: Contact Effects in a Cross-linguistic Context

Naomi G. Nagy et al. — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:48 PDT

This paper presents an overview of the first variable examined in the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto project (Nagy 2009), which strives to apply consistent methodology across multiple language-contact contexts and variables to advance our understanding of contact-induced change. It is principally comprised of sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Toronto with 40 speakers from each of six heritage languages (Cantonese, Faetar, Italian, Korean, Russian and Ukrainian). Participants are also asked about their ethnic identification, language use, and linguistic attitudes (Keefe & Padilla 1987, Hoffman & Walker 2010). Responses are translated into index scores to quantify each speakers' orientation toward their heritage language/culture and their English/"Canadian" culture.

Here we examine the effects of a constellation of factors (linguistic, typological, demographic, social) on a single linguistic variable: (pro-drop). Our Cantonese, Italian and Russian data, ~6,000 tokens, is contrasted with a sample from the Toronto English Archive (Tagliamonte & Denis 2010). For comparability with previous studies of pro-drop, we examine the effects of continuity of reference (Cameron 1995), contextual/formal ambiguity of the subject's referent (Paredes Silva 1993), clause type (Harvie 1998), priming by the preceding subject (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010), person and number of the subject, and tense of the following verb. Pro-drop rates and constraint hierarchies in each HL show no relationship to any indices of generation since immigration, ethnic identity or language use, suggesting that this variable is not used to construct ethnic identity and is not undergoing change as the heritage varieties of each language develop in Toronto.

New England Borderlands: A New Investigation of the East–West Boundary

Thomas Leddy-Cecere et al. — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:46 PDT

Kurath (1939) proposed an east-west boundary along the Green Mountains of Vermont (Linguistic Atlas of New England). Likewise, The Atlas of North American English (ANAE) (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006) draws a dialect boundary between Eastern and Western New England around the Vermont/New Hampshire border. However, there are no ANAE data points along the east-west boundary itself because that project focused on larger cities. This leaves a gap in contemporary understanding of this transition zone between two major US dialect regions. Labov et al. state that “a more precise contemporary delineation of the borders between the subregions of New England awaits more detailed local studies” (2006:230). Our study helps to answer that call.

With the goal of revisiting Kurath’s work along the East-West boundary 70 years later, in 2010 we recorded 42 senior citizens representing 31 small town VT/NH locations around Kurath’s line. For the FATHER/BOTHER merger, postvocalic /r/, and BATH [a], we find that East-West distinctions continue to be very strong in this age group. However, our results also suggest that, since the time of Kurath, the line of contrast has moved eastward from the Green Mountains toward the Connecticut River (VT/NH border). Other variables showed no significant east-west contrasts.

Back to Back: The Trajectory of an Old Borrowing

Ruth King — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:45 PDT

In this paper I explore changes in varieties of North American French resulting from a) loss in productivity of the re- prefix in French; and b) availability of the English particle back in contact varieties. We see that addition of back to speakers’ repertoires is dependent upon social factors while its integration into the grammar of vernacular varieties may involve both semantic and syntactic reanalysis of the English lexical item. Under the right social conditions, back becomes a French aspectual adverb.

Discourse Like in Quebec English

Laura Kastronic — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:43 PDT

This study considers the spread of discourse like in Quebec English. Although several previous studies have examined the pragmatic functions and rate of use of like as a discourse marker, few consider its interaction with the syntactic structure and most focus solely on English-dominant communities. Thus, while D’Arcy (2005) has shown that this discourse feature is spreading systematically throughout the syntactic structure in apparent time in Toronto, it is unknown whether its evolution is as advanced in communities such as Quebec, where English is a minority language, isolated from mainstream varieties.

We analyze the rate of use of discourse like in three distinct structural contexts (CP, DP, and vP) by 39 native English speakers from the Quebec English Corpus (Poplack, et al., 2006). Speakers from both Montreal and Quebec City were included in this study since the degree of isolation from mainstream English is arguably greater in the latter. Internal grammatical factors and external factors are also analyzed.

The results show that while both Quebec City and Montreal speakers exhibit substantially lower rates than Toronto speakers in their use of like in each of the structural contexts examined, the internal conditioning of like in Quebec English is practically identical to that in Toronto English. These findings only partially support the hypothesis that these speakers’ isolation from mainstream English causes them to lag behind in ongoing change and highlight the complexity involved in the exploration of such a widespread and multifaceted phenomenon.

Variation in the voseo and tuteo Negative Imperatives in Argentine Spanish

Mary Johnson et al. — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:41 PDT

Among the many voseante countries in the Spanish-speaking world, there is much variation in the verb forms affected. Despite the use of the pronoun vos, some verb inflections may remain in the tu form, while others take the vos form. Argentine Spanish is a dialect that is mostly voseante, but includes an alternation between the negative imperative that comes from the tuteo and the voseo negative imperative. Previous studies have indicated that these alternating imperatives are accompanied by a difference in pragmatic meaning. The present study expands on the work that has already been done on the alternation found among these imperatives. Data is presented from an online survey with 151 native speakers of Argentine Spanish, and a multivariate analysis using Rbrul explores the degree to which the pragmatic difference is manifested through a variety of social variables including gender, age and geography. Results indicate that along with speaker effects, gender is the most relevant social factor governing the choice between negative imperatives in this variety.

I Might Not Would Say That: A Sociolinguistic Study of Double Modal Acceptance

J. Daniel Hasty — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:40 PDT

While the double modal (e.g., I might could go to the store) is a well know feature of Southern United States English, most previous studies have focused mainly on explaining the double modal’s syntactic structure. With this focus on syntax these studies generally have used small and/or socially homogeneous samples; thus there we have little information about what social constraints might exist on double modal usage.

Because the double modal is a relatively infrequently occurring syntactic form that does not alternate with another easily identifiable form, sociolinguistic methods of counting occurrences and non-occurrences in spontaneous speech are not adequate. In light of this, the present study utilized syntactic acceptability judgments to examine the effect of social factors on double modal acceptance in Northeast Tennessee.

Age, gender, and educational level were found to significantly constrain respondents’ acceptance of double modal sentences. Age was the strongest predictor of acceptance with the youngest respondents the most accepting of double modal forms, followed by the oldest, and then the middle aged suggestive of possible age grading. Furthermore, men and respondents with less education were more likely to accept double modals than were women and respondents with more education; however, the gender and education effects hold only for the middle and old age groups. Thus, the young respondents are the most accepting and the most homogeneous group. This distribution supports a hypothesis that double modals are avoided by those who most value unmarked forms: adults in the prime years for employment. Planned future work including language attitude data will be beneficial in fully understanding the social distribution and perception of double modals.

Meaningful Variation and Bidirectional Change in Rural Child and Adolescent Language

Rania Habib — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:38 PDT

This study investigates the spread of two urban features used in Syrian urban centers such as Damascus and Hims to the vernacular Arabic of non-migrant, rural children and adolescents who are residing in the Syrian village of Oyoun Al-Wadi. The first of the two features is the spread of the urban glottal stop in place of the rural voiceless uvular stop. The second is the spread of the low back vowel [a] in place of the rural mid front vowel [e]. The study shows that linguistic change in this village is moving in two opposing directions. Girls continue to use their initially acquired mothers’ urban features in their adolescent years, whereas boys who initially acquired and used their mothers’ urban features start to switch to the village features around the age of eight and increase their use of these features with age. The study also shows that the observed variation and changes result from the different meanings associated with the urban and rural sounds under investigation, and that these variation and changes are gender- and age-related. In addition, the study shows that the youth’s emotional involvement in building a social identity starts in pre-adolescence, which indicates early sociolinguistic maturity and competence in kids.

Nasal Short-a Systems vs. the Northern Cities Shift

Aaron J. Dinkin — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:37 PDT

Labov et al. (2006) discuss a taxonomy of configurations of short-a in American English, including the nasal system (in which the prenasal allophone of short-a is relatively high and discretely different from the low non-prenasal allophone), the continuous system (in which short-a is spread out over a continuous area of phonetic space, from higher prenasal tokens to lower non-prenasal tokens), and the raised system associated with the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), in which all tokens of short-a are high. This paper uses this taxonomy as a starting point for an analysis of the status of short-a in the different dialect regions of Upstate New York (Dinkin 2009). The data show that a fourth pattern needs to be added to the three listed above: a raised nasal short-a system, in which there is a sharp phonetic difference between prenasal and non-prenasal allophones, but even the non-prenasal allophone is located quite high in the vowel space. The raised nasal system is most frequent in the Inland North Fringe, the dialect region where some but not most speakers exhibit advanced NCS. In the Hudson Valley region, where nasal short-a patterns are extremely prevalent, NCS features are present at high degrees of advancement except the raising of short-a. An analysis based on the “life cycle of phonological patterns” (Bermudez-Otero 2007) suggests that the nasal system itself may be responsible for blocking the general raising of the non-prenasal allophone here.

Innovators and Innovation: Tracking the Innovators of and stuff in York English

Derek Denis — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:36 PDT

The transatlantic perspective on general extenders (GEs) illuminates an aspect of linguistic change that is rarely observed in the language variation and change literature -- the incipient stage. This paper considers some characteristics of the incipient stage of an innovation in the context of a close examination of a change in progress in the GE system of York English and asks, who are the innovators in a speech community? This data is contrasted with similar findings from the Toronto English Archive (Tagliamonte and Denis 2010). In both communities there is a change in progress such that one type of GE in the system is increasing. In Toronto, this increase is monotonic and spans the apparent time range of the corpus. However, in York, the same rise is not present until after the 1960s. This observation is leveraged to investigate the incipient stage of linguistic change.

For the Record: Which Digital Media Can be Used for Sociophonetic Analysis?

Paul De Decker et al. — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:34 PDT

Sociolinguists now have more options for collecting speech data than ever before. Informants who might otherwise be inaccessible to the analyst could record themselves using smartphones and personal computers; researchers might also consider YouTube or recordings uploaded to other internet sites as sources of data. However, digital compression techniques simplify some acoustic content and discard others (Bulgin, De Decker & Nycz 2010) while lower-quality microphones may distort the quality of the signal (Van Son, R.J.J.H. 2005). Therefore, before such data can be used for dialect research, it is crucial to determine if these media affect the reliability of acoustic analyses (Gonzalez, Cervera and Llau 2003; Gonzalez and Cervera 2001). As an initial test, we looked the effect of these devices on representations of the vowel space. Male and female speakers were recorded reading a word list containing 10 English monophthongs in h_d context using a Roland Edirol R-09 (WAV format) recorder, an Apple iPhone (lossless Apple m4a), a Macbook Pro running Praat 5.1 (WAV) and a Mino Flip video camera (AVI converted to AIFF). The Mino Flip file was then uploaded to Youtube and subsequently downloaded (MP3) for analysis. Speakers read each word 3 times while seated in a quiet room with the recorders placed on a table in front of them. Measurements of F1 through F4 were taken at the temporal midpoint of each vowel using Praat 5.1. Differences between recording formats were tested in R using a Repeated Measures ANOVA with separate runs for each formant (F1-F4). Preliminary results indicate that the Mino and Mino-derived YouTube formats differ substantially from the lossless Edirol recording. F1 values for most vowels were raised in Mino and Youtube measurements. F2 was also affected, such that front vowels were artificially raised while back vowels were lowered. Thus the vowel space is effectively altered with lowering along the F1 dimension and a widening of the space along the F2 dimension. These effects seem to be exaggerated for the female speaker. Based on these results, Macbook Pro and iPhone may be suitable recording options for studying the vowel spaces of speakers. Mino and its Youtube derivative show a number of significant deviations from lossless recordings indicating that audio from these devices should not be used for this type of analysis until corrective measures are identified.

The Interaction of Transmission and Diffusion in the Spread of Linguistic Forms

Patricia Cukor-Avila et al. — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:33 PDT

This paper explores the relationship between transmission and diffusion with data on the use of two innovative features, habitual invariant be and quotative be like, across four generations of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers from the rural community of Springville, Texas. The data from this rural setting show fundamental differences on the acquisition and spread of each of these features. There is no steady transmission from generation to generation that results in the gradual increased use of habitual invariant be, but rather it is contact with adolescents from outside Springville that accounts for the diffusion of these forms in the community. Only for the youngest generation do we see evidence of transmission. Transmission is the likely source for the use of quotative be like by the youngest speakers; however, diffusion from outside the community is what appears to be accelerating this change forward. As we show, the interaction of transmission and diffusion is a consequence of the social situation present in Springville coupled with the changing demographics of the Springville School.

Verbal -s in Vernacular Newfoundland English: A Combined Variationist and Formal Account of Grammatical Change

Philip Comeau — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:31 PDT

While most studies of generalised verbal –s report the effects of the Northern Subject Rule (subject type and adjacency between the subject and the verb condition verbal –s), work on this feature in Vernacular Newfoundland English (VNE) report a lack of NSR effects. Instead, verbal –s in VNE is associated with habitual aspect and verb stativity. This paper integrates generative and variationist approaches to account for variation and change in the VNE aspect system. Quantitative results confirm a change in progress: there is a decrease in overall rate of verbal –s and a change in constraints across apparent time. Older consultants’ use of verbal –s is constrained by both habituality and stativity while the middle-aged cohort’s system involves only verb stativity. Younger consultants show a different system within which particular adverbials favor verbal –s. Formally, since both habituals and statives are imperfective, I posit that verbal –s is an imperfective marker in this variety. The linguistic change can be accounted for under Minimalism by positing a change in the featural specification of the Aspect head from one which is intrinsically specified for the imperfective feature prior to syntax to one which must be bound by an operator, in this case, quantificational adverbials.

Reshaping the Vowel System: An Index of Phonetic Innovation in Canadian English

Charles Boberg — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:30 PDT

This paper examines two current sound changes in Canadian English (CE): the Canadian Shift (CS) and the fronting of back-upgliding vowels. Among the changes involved in the CS is the retraction of the TRAP vowel from its initial position in the low-front quadrant of the vowel space to a new position in the low-central region. Among the changes affecting the back-upgliding vowels is a forward shift in the nuclear position of the GOOSE vowel, traditionally a back vowel, whose main allophones are now located in the high-front quadrant. Thus, TRAP is shifting backwards and GOOSE is shifting forwards. These changes are demonstrated with an apparent-time analysis of the speech of 60 speakers from two age groups in three cities: Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax. The relative positions of TRAP and GOOSE in F2 space are expressed as an Index of Phonetic Innovation (IPI), calculated as the mean F2 of GOOSE subtracted from the mean F2 of TRAP. Positive IPI values, with TRAP still further forward than GOOSE, reflect comparatively conservative vowel systems, which tend to have a trapezoidal shape, with two low corners: one in the front, at TRAP, and one in the back, at the LOT vowel. Negative IPI values, with GOOSE further forward than TRAP, reflect comparatively innovative vowel systems, which tend to have a triangular shape, with retracted and lowered TRAP as the bottom corner of an inverted triangle, and LOT located on its rear side. Multivariate statistical analysis of a larger sample of 86 younger speakers from every region of Canada finds that both region and speaker sex have significant effects on the IPI. The most innovative vowel systems tend to be found among women in the most urbanized regions of Canada, particularly the metropolitan areas focused on Toronto and Vancouver, while the most conservative vowel systems tend to be found among men in the less urbanized regions, especially the Prairies and Atlantic Canada. These types are illustrated with detailed analyses of individual speakers from Montreal and Toronto.

The Impact of Language Revival on Linguistic Structure: Neuter Subject Pronouns in Picard

Julie Auger — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:28 PDT

This paper examines the impact that non-native speakers have had on the structure of Picard, a Gallo-Romance language spoken in northern France and southern Belgium. Focusing on neuter subjects, a construction that is characterized by a more complex system than the equivalent form in French (the other language spoken by all Picard speakers), we compare the systems used by native and non-native speakers. Given that all three forms are used by all speakers in our corpus, a variationist approach is adopted to determine whether the same syntactic and phonological factors govern the distribution of the three forms in the two types of speakers. This analysis confirms that non-native speakers have acquired many of the constraints that characterize the grammar of traditional speakers but shows that their dominant language, French, has weakened the effect of the syntactic factors.

On Gender Differences in the Distribution of um and uh

Eric K. Acton — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:27 PDT

While the so-called “fillers” um and uh share a great deal in the way of interpretation, association, and usage, they are far from perfect substitutes. Previous corpus research, focusing primarily on British English, has identified a number of social and discursive factors with which filler usage can vary, including pause length and position in an utterance and speaker age, gender, and social class (Rayson et al. 1997, Clark and Fox Tree 2002, Tottie 2011, inter alia). Building on such research, the present paper investigates social variation in the use of um and uh in the United States. In particular, the paper documents the results of two corpus-based investigations of women’s and men’s usage of um and uh demonstrating that, among the speakers represented in the corpora, women on the aggregate had a far higher ratio of um tokens to uh tokens (um/uh ratio) than did men. The first of the two corpora examined is a collection of 992 transcripts from three speed-dating events held for graduate students at an American university in 2005. In this corpus, women’s average um/uh ratio is more than 3.5 times that of men. An analysis of gendered filler usage in the Switchboard Corpus (SWBC) yields a similar result: women’s average um/uh ratio in the SWBC is more than 2.5 times that of men. Data from the SWBC likewise suggest that this general trend persists across age groups and major U.S. dialect regions and, furthermore, tends to hold for speakers regardless of the gender of their interlocutors. The SWBC also provides evidence suggesting that um is gaining currency relative to uh; i.e., that there is a linguistic change in progress whereby the use of um relative to uh is on the rise. It is noted that not all men and women in the corpora exhibit filler usage in line with the aggregate-level trends, and that gendered linguistic differentiation should not be assumed to be a direct reflection of gender per se (Eckert 1989). A thorough understanding of the dynamics of gender and filler usage calls for an examination of the meanings and associations of um and uh and of speakers’ stances, objectives, and relation to their social world.

Preface

Meredith Tamminga — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:31:25 PDT

The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from NWAV and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium.

This volume contains selected papers from NWAV 39, held from November 4-6, 2010 in San Antonio, TX at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Alphabetic thanks go to Claire Crawford, Aaron Ecay, Lauren Friedman, Kyle Gorman, Soohyun Kwon, Marielle Lerner, Laurel MacKenzie, and Hilary Prichard for help in editing.

Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. Since Vol. 13.2, PWPL has been published both in print and online gratis via ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Due to the large number of hits these online papers have received, and the time and expense of managing a back catalog of PWPL volumes, the editorial committee decided in 2008 to cease print publication in favor of wider-scale free online dissemination. Please continue citing PWPL papers or issues as you would a print journal article, though you may also provide the URL of the manuscript. An example is below:

Acton, Eric K. 2011. On Gender Differences in the Distribution of um and uh. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 17.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 39, ed. M. Tamminga, 1-9. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol17/iss2/2

Ultimately, the entire back catalog will be digitized and made available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn.

Publication in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) does not preclude submission of papers elsewhere; copyright is retained by the author(s) of individual papers.

The PWPL editors can be contacted at:
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Meredith Tamminga
Issue Editor

Speaker Attitude and Sexual Orientation Affect Phonetic Imitation

Alan Yu et al. — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:54:59 PDT

Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon of phonetic convergence: the process by which speakers alter their productions to become more similar on some phonetic or acoustic dimension to those of their interlocutor. Though social factors have been suggested as a motivator for imitation, few studies have established a tight connection between these extralinguistic factors and a speaker’s likelihood to imitate. The present study explores the effects of perceived sexual orientation and speaker attitude toward the interlocutor on the likelihood of imitation for extended VOT. Experimental results show that the extent of phonetic convergence (and divergence) depends on the perceived sexual orientation of the talker as well as whether the speaker is positively disposed to the interlocutor.