Phonetic alignment to regional variants in interaction

Alignment is the process of adapting speech to another interlocutor’s speech. We set out to explore whether speakers align phonetically to regional variants since no clear evidence has been reported (Gessinger et al ., 2019; Earnshaw, 2021) and if so, what the driving mechanism is (local versus global context). We investigated phonetic alignment to two regional variants of a Dutch phoneme, known as the “hard g” or “soft g.” Participants interacted with two confederates differing in their regional variants in a sentence completion task (total of 268 sentences). In a pre-test, participants completed sentences by themselves. They then interacted with Confederate 1 (Round 1), with Confederate 2 (Round 2), and again with Confederate 1 in Round 3, and lastly by themselves again in the post-test. We investigated the duration and Centre of Gravity of the 15 085 fricatives of 36 participants. We examined three different predictors testing for differences between short-term and long-term alignment effects. None of these predictors showed significant effects of alignment. Descriptive analyses showed tremendous variation among speakers. We conclude that phonetic alignment of regional variants is not as clear as phonetic alignment previously demonstrated in less ecologically valid studies.