Phonetic change in an Antarctic winter.

An acoustic analysis was made of the speech characteristics of individuals recorded before and during a prolonged stay in Antarctica. A computational model was used to predict the expected changes due to close contact and isolation, which were then compared with the actual recorded productions. The individuals were found to develop the first stages of a common accent in Antarctica whose phonetic characteristics were in some respects predicted by the computational model. These findings suggest that the phonetic attributes of a spoken accent in its initial stages emerge through interactions between individuals causing speech production to be incrementally updated.