GRANT MCGUIRE SPEAKS IN GERMANY

Grant McGuire recently gave a talk at the Second Conference on Sound Change in Kloster-Seeon, in Bavaria, Germany, where he presented a paper “Imitation as a mechanism for the spread of sound change” along with his colleague, Molly Babel (UBC). Alice Nicholls (BA 2011) assisted in implementing the experiment that was the backbone of the presentation, but was unable to attend. This paper examined how voices with different properties, such as social desirability and typicality, affect the degree to which voices are spontaneously imitated in speech, what acoustic properties are imitated, and how this connects to theories of sound change.