Individual differences in prosodic imitation

International audienceSpeakers strongly vary in their imitation abilities, but the factors underlying this variation are still unclear. This study examined whether individual differences in working memory affect the accuracy of imitation of phonological and phonetic aspects of French prosody. Thirty-six French native speakers were asked to listen to twenty sentences extracted from a read and a spontaneous speech corpus, and to repeat the words and the way the utterances were said. Overall, obligatory phonological events (boundary tones and the H* tone of LH* rises) were more accurately reproduced than optional phonological ones (the Hi tone of LHi rises) and their speaker-specific phonetic details. Speakers with higher working memory capacities were more accurate in phonological imitation of both obligatory and optional phonological events, possibly because of their increased capacity in retaining the prosodic characteristics of the utterances. Imitating read speech, which was richer in terms of number of LHi rises, was slightly more difficult for speakers with low working memory capacities. There was no relation between working memory and imitation of phonetic aspects, which showed more idiosyncratic patterns of imitation. Our findings indicate that working memory constraints should be taken into account in modelling prosodic imitation, along with linguistic and task-specific factors