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.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-29-2020
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.00038
Funding Information
The research reported here is part of SPeech Across Dialects of English (SPADE): Large-scale digital analysis of a spoken language across space and time (2017–2020); ESRC Grant ES/R003963/1, NSERC/CRSNG Grant RGPDD 501771-16, SSHRC/CRSH Grant 869-2016-0006, NSF Grant SMA-1730479 (Digging into Data/Trans-Atlantic Platform), and was also supported by SSHRC #435-2017-0925 awarded to MS and a Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture International Internship award granted to JT.
Related Content
The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.
Repository Citation
Tanner, James; Sonderegger, Morgan; Stuart-Smith, Jane; and Fruehwald, Josef, "Toward "English" Phonetics: Variability in the Pre-Consonantal Voicing Effect across English Dialects and Speakers" (2020). Linguistics Faculty Publications. 75.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/lin_facpub/75
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, v. 3, article 38, p. 1-15.
© 2020 Tanner, Sonderegger, Stuart-Smith and Fruehwald.
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