Unconscious phonetic convergence causes people to imitate others' accents
Evidence from speech motor control, predictive coding, and sensorimotor integration strongly supports the view that people unintentionally imitate others' phonetic patterns through auditory-motor mechanisms.
The claim is a well-established empirical phenomenon in psycholinguistics known as phonetic convergence or accommodation. Multiple retrieved papers directly discuss the mechanisms of how speech perception automatically shapes speech production (phonetic convergence), framed through active inference, predictive coding, and sensorimotor integration. There are no papers refuting the core premise that people imitate accents unconsciously.
Bradshaw AR, Press C, Davis MH. Active inference and speech motor control.. 2026. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-026-02871-1
Paper 3 describes active inference frameworks that explicitly model how hearing other voices leads to phonetic convergence through sensory prediction error minimization.
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Chiara Gambi, Martin J Pickering. Prediction and imitation in speech.. 2013. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00340
Paper 9 reviews how speakers automatically imitate phonetic properties of heard voices and models this convergence as a consequence of sensorimotor prediction error correction.
Craig Thorburn, Lin Zhou, Frederic Dick, Nazbanou Nozari, Lori L Holt. Speech motor control is not sequestered from general auditory processes.. 2026. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001901
Paper 10 demonstrates that short-term changes in speech perception directly influence speech production, linking general auditory processing to phonetic convergence.
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