Toward “English” Phonetics: Variability in the Pre-consonantal Voicing Effect Across English Dialects and Speakers

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Recent advances in access to spoken-language corpora and development of speech processing tools have made possible the performance of “large-scale” phonetic and sociolinguistic research. This study illustrates the usefulness of such a large-scale approach—using data from multiple corpora across a range of English dialects, collected, and analyzed with the SPADE project—to examine how the pre-consonantal Voicing Effect (longer vowels before voiced than voiceless obstruents, in e.g., bead vs. beat) is realized in spontaneous speech, and varies across dialects and individual speakers. Compared with previous reports of controlled laboratory speech, the Voicing Effect was found to be substantially smaller in spontaneous speech, but still influenced by the expected range of phonetic factors. Dialects of English differed substantially from each other in the size of the Voicing Effect, whilst individual speakers varied little relative to their particular dialect. This study demonstrates the value of large-scale phonetic research as a means of developing our understanding of the structure of speech variability, and illustrates how large-scale studies, such as those carried out within SPADE, can be applied to other questions in phonetic and sociolinguistic research.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@article{tanner2020,
  author = {Tanner, James and Sonderegger, Morgan and Stuart-Smith, Jane
    and Fruehwald, Josef},
  title = {Toward “{English}” {Phonetics:} {Variability} in the
    {Pre-consonantal} {Voicing} {Effect} {Across} {English} {Dialects}
    and {Speakers}},
  journal = {Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence},
  volume = {3},
  pages = {38},
  date = {2020/05/29},
  url = {https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7861323/},
  doi = {10.3389/frai.2020.00038},
  langid = {en},
  abstract = {Recent advances in access to spoken-language corpora and
    development of speech processing tools have made possible the
    performance of “large-scale” phonetic and sociolinguistic research.
    This study illustrates the usefulness of such a large-scale
    approach—using data from multiple corpora across a range of English
    dialects, collected, and analyzed with the SPADE project—to examine
    how the pre-consonantal Voicing Effect (longer vowels before voiced
    than voiceless obstruents, in e.g., bead vs. beat) is realized in
    spontaneous speech, and varies across dialects and individual
    speakers. Compared with previous reports of controlled laboratory
    speech, the Voicing Effect was found to be substantially smaller in
    spontaneous speech, but still influenced by the expected range of
    phonetic factors. Dialects of English differed substantially from
    each other in the size of the Voicing Effect, whilst individual
    speakers varied little relative to their particular dialect. This
    study demonstrates the value of large-scale phonetic research as a
    means of developing our understanding of the structure of speech
    variability, and illustrates how large-scale studies, such as those
    carried out within SPADE, can be applied to other questions in
    phonetic and sociolinguistic research.}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Tanner, James, Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith, and Josef Fruehwald. 2020–5AD. “Toward ‘English’ Phonetics: Variability in the Pre-Consonantal Voicing Effect Across English Dialects and Speakers.” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 3: 38. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.00038.