Corpora Analyses of Frequency of Schwa Deletion in Conversational American English

Patterson, David J.; LoCasto, Paul C.; Connine, Cynthia M.

doi:10.1159/000070453

Cited by 60 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(45 reference statements)

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“…For a slow speech tempo, deletion rates dropped to 2% and 13% for these environments. More recently, Patterson, LoCasto, and Connine (2001) examined a conversational database (Switchboard) and found a sixfold difference in deletion rate between two-and three-syllable words with identical structure to those used in the present experiments. Interestingly, the overall deletion rate for two-syllable words was very low (only 9.8%), relative to three-syllable words (54.7%).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Rule-governed missing information in spoken word recognition: Schwa vowel deletion

LoCasto

Connine

2002

Perception & Psychophysics

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Vowel deletion is a phonological process in which an unstressed /@/ (schwa) vowel is deleted during pronunciation. In Experiment 1, vowel-deleted and vowel-reduced versions of two-and three-syllable words rated for pronunciation acceptability showed reduced acceptability for deleted vowel versions with a greater decrement for two-syllable words. Experiments 2 and 3 used vowel-intact and voweldeleted productions preceded by themselves (repetition prime), their alternative production (variant prime), or a control (unrelated) prime. Lexical decisions to three-syllable vowel-intact and vowel-deleted targets,as well as to two-syllable vowel-intacttargets, showed greaterpriming in the repetition conditions than in the variant conditions. Two-syllable vowel-deleted targets, however, showed comparable repetition and variant priming. The results are discussed in terms of lexical activation and representation of phonological variants. A model is offered in which activation based on similarity triggers utilization of phonological inferences only when required for successful recognition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Rule-governed missing information in spoken word recognition: Schwa vowel deletion

LoCasto

Connine

2002

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…Various studies found the same correlation between the first two formants and the movement of the tongue into a schwa position. The first formant correlates with the low-high dimension of tongue movement while the second formant correlates with the backfront dimension of tongue movement (Patterson et al 2003;Slifka 2005;Gósy 2004b;Stevens 1998). …”

Section: Figmentioning

confidence: 97%

Automatic recognition of schwa variants in spontaneous Hungarian speech

Beke¹,

Szaszák²

2010

Acta Linguistica Hungarica

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This paper analyzes the nature of the process involved in optional vowel reduction in Hungarian, and the acoustic structure of schwa variants in spontaneous speech. The study focuses on the acoustic patterns of both the basic realizations of Hungarian vowels and their realizations as neutral vowels (schwas), as well as on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of algorithms for the recognition of both types of realizations from the speech waveform. The authors address the question whether schwas form a unified group of vowels or they show some dependence on the originally intended articulation of the vowel they stand for. The acoustic study uses a database consisting of over 4,000 utterances extracted from continuous speech, and recorded from 19 speakers. The authors propose methods for the recognition of neutral vowels depending on the various vowels they replace in spontaneous speech. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are calculated and used for the training of Hidden Markov Models. The recognition system was trained on 2,500 utterances and then tested on 1,500 utterances. The results show that a neutral vowel can be detected in 72% of all occurrences. Stressed and unstressed syllables can be distinguished in 92% of all cases. Neutralized vowels do not form a unified group of phoneme realizations. The pronunciation of schwa heavily depends on the original articulation configuration of the intended vowel.

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“…Phonological reductions, that is, "the articulatory weakening or complete deletion of segments and syllables" (Ernestus, 2009(Ernestus, , p. 1875, are very common in casual speech (e.g., Johnson, 2004;Patterson, LoCasto, & Connine, 2003). A native speaker of Dutch might for instance articulate the /b/ in baron "baron" as a labio-dental approximant ([ʋ]) or shorten the prefix ver-in verlangen "desire" to [fː].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual adaptation to segmental and syllabic reductions in continuous spoken Dutch

Poellmann

Bosker

McQueen

et al. 2014

Journal of Phonetics

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A B S T R A C TThis study investigates if and how listeners adapt to reductions in casual continuous speech. In a perceptuallearning variant of the visual-world paradigm, two groups of Dutch participants were exposed to either segmental (/b/ → [ʋ]) or syllabic (ver-→ [fː]) reductions in spoken Dutch sentences. In the test phase, both groups heard both kinds of reductions, but now applied to different words. In one of two experiments, the segmental reduction exposure group was better than the syllabic reduction exposure group in recognizing new reduced /b/-words. In both experiments, the syllabic reduction group showed a greater target preference for new reduced ver-words. Learning about reductions was thus applied to previously unheard words. This lexical generalization suggests that mechanisms compensating for segmental and syllabic reductions take place at a prelexical level, and hence that lexical access involves an abstractionist mode of processing. Existing abstractionist models need to be revised, however, as they do not include representations of sequences of segments (corresponding e.g. to ver-) at the prelexical level.

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Corpora Analyses of Frequency of Schwa Deletion in Conversational American English

Cited by 60 publications

References 29 publications

Rule-governed missing information in spoken word recognition: Schwa vowel deletion

Rule-governed missing information in spoken word recognition: Schwa vowel deletion

Automatic recognition of schwa variants in spontaneous Hungarian speech

Perceptual adaptation to segmental and syllabic reductions in continuous spoken Dutch

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