The entropy of intoxicated speech.lexical creativity and heavy tongues

Abstract

Spontaneous speech produced in sober and intoxicated conditions has been compared in information theoretic terms on the phoneme and word level to examine phonological and lexical aspects of intoxication. Word level entropy has been calculated to capture roughly the effect of alcohol on cognitive lexical creativity. Phoneme level entropy is intended to reflect heavy tongue influences on phoneme combinations. Moreover, mispronunciations have been investigated by relating canonical to realised pronunciation by means of mutual information and the Levenshtein distance. To account for the gradual nature of intoxication, examinations have been carried out regarding the offsets and slopes of linear functions mapping the blood alcohol concentration to the information theoretic variables. It turned out that male speakers compensate less for the alcohol-induced degradations with regard to lexical creativity and articulatory precision than female speakers. Furthermore, the pronunciation of male speakers generally deviates more from canonical forms.