Using Mahalanobis Distances to Investigate Second Dialect Acquisition: A Study on Quebec French.
Josiane Riverin-Coutlée, Johanna-Pascale Roy, Michele Gubian
PMID 35723215WHAT IT FOUND
Newcomers to Quebec City subtly shifted their vowel pronunciation toward local norms over one year, even when starting with no obvious accent difference.
The changes were small and uneven, proving dialect adaptation begins as fine-grained acoustic drift rather than sudden, obvious mimicry.
Key findings
01Mobile speakers' vowel pronunciation shifted toward the local sedentary norm over a single year, with the average distance to the target system reducing from 1.31 to 1.17.
02Adaptation was highly variable and not all-or-nothing: individual speakers both converged and diverged on different vowels, and one speaker diverged from almost all targets.
03Vowels in the crowded upper part of the acoustic space changed more, while vowels in the less crowded low area showed very little adaptation.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study lost 37.5% of its mobile participants after just one year, leaving only 15 for analysis. The participants were exclusively young female university students, which does not represent the broader population of people who move to a new city. The researchers only measured vowels at a single midpoint, ignoring how the sound changes throughout the vowel (formant dynamics), which is important in Quebec French. The study treated the sedentary group's speech as a fixed target, but the university campus is linguistically diverse, meaning the local norm the students were exposed to may have been shifting as well.
Declared interests
Funded by a doctoral grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and an ERC grant.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a lack of obvious accent means a newcomer has not adapted to a local dialect. The study found that subtle, fine-grained acoustic changes happen even when the starting speech already falls within the locally acceptable range.