Have you ever found yourself unintentionally imitating how a friend, television character, or media personality talks after listening to them for a while? This is a well-established phenomenon that linguists call linguistic convergence, which refers to temporary (and often subtle) shifts in speech to sound more similar to those around us. A new study in the March 2022 issue of the journal Language, authored by Lacey Wade (University of Pennsylvania) shows that even our expectations about how other people might speak (rather than the speech itself) is enough to shape our own speech patterns.
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Source: Phys.org