The effect of speech situation on the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants

Abstract

This article presents two studies investigating how the situation in which speech is uttered affects the frequency with which words are reduced. Study 1 is based on the Spoken Dutch Corpus, which consists of 15 components, nearly all representing a different speech situation. This study shows that the components differ in how often ten semantically weak words are highly reduced. The differences are especially large between the components with scripted and unscripted speech. Within the component group of unscripted speech, the formality of the situation shows an effect. Study 2 investigated segment reduction in a shadowing experiment in which participants repeated Dutch carefully and casually articulated sentences. Prefixal schwa and suffixal /t/ were absent in participants' responses to both sentences types as often as in formal interviews. If a segment was absent, this appeared to be mostly due to extreme coarticulation, unlike in speech produced in less formal situations. Speakers thus adapted more to the formal situation of the experiment than to the stimuli to be shadowed. We conclude that speech situation affects the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants, which should be accounted for by psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension.

A bi-directional task-based corpus of learners’ conversational speech

“…scripted) speech has the advantage that the material can be controlled much more precisely than in conversational speech, there are several reasons to prefer the latter. Spontaneous conversational speech is more representative of the everyday communicative situation in which both native and non-native talkers find themselves, and differs in many ways from read speech e.g., in the choice of words, syntactic structures, frequency and type of hesitations, speech rate, pause types, pause structure, intonation, and acoustic characteristics (Blaauw, 1994;Ernestus et al, 2015;Howell & Kadi-Hanifi, 1991;Laan, 1997;Nakamura et al, 2008). Consequently, analyses using spontaneous speech provide more realistic answers to questions concerning non-native speaking.…”

Register variation by Spanish users of English: The Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English

“…We know from these studies that L1 speakers adapt their language use to the situational context by varying word choice, pronunciation and syntactic structures, for example (e.g. Biber 1988;Biber and Conrad 2009;Ernestus et al 2015;Lee 2001;Van Herk 2012). This adaptation to the speech situation has been studied in different languages.…”

The influence of social distance on speech behavior: Formality variation in casual speech

“…This implicates that people do not only adapt their speech behavior to their interlocutor's speech, but additionally, take social characteristics like age, education, profession and even clothing into consideration, when they assess the formality of the speech situation. Labov (2006Labov ( [1966), Stolarski (2013) and Ernestus et al (2015), among others, studied how speakers address their audience in formal versus informal settings or when discussing formal versus informal topics of conversation. Kouwenhoven et al (2015) investigated informal versus formal speech as well, and examined speech behavior in non-native interaction.…”