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

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.

Advancements of Phonetics in the 21st century: Quantitative data analysis

“…Sonderegger (2023, 10.3) shows examples, using phonetic data, for frequentist mixed-effects models (using lme4). Tanner et al (2020b) examines the predicted effect of following consonant voicing on vowel duration across 30 English dialects, by extracting from a Bayesian linear mixed-effects model the predicted effect, with 95% credible intervals, for each dialect.…”

“…For example, Sonderegger et al (2023) show that production of /s/ is more variable than /S/ across English speakers by using the posterior distribution over random-effect variances capturing the degree of by-speaker variability in the spectral peak of each sound. Similarly, Tanner et al (2020b) shows that dialects differ more than speakers (within-dialect) in the effect of consonant voicing on vowel duration by comparing the by-dialect and by-speaker variances.…”

The Exploration of English Consonant: A Literature Review

“…Variation in pronunciation can be observed based on regional dialects, social class, ethnic backgrounds, and individual speech communities. Different sociolinguistic groups may exhibit specific patterns of consonant pronunciation, leading to variation and distinct accents (Tanner et al, 2020). d. Individual Factors: Individual factors refer to the idiosyncratic differences in consonant pronunciation among speakers.…”

Computational sociophonetics using automatic speech recognition

“…Tanner et al. (2020) used multiple force‐aligned English corpora and found dialectal differences in vowel lengthening before voiced word‐final obstruents. Finally, as mentioned above, Coto‐Solano et al.…”

“…professional recorders vs. smartphones and iPads). Tanner et al (2020) used multiple force-aligned English corpora and found dialectal differences in vowel lengthening before voiced word-final obstruents. Finally, as mentioned above, Coto-Solano et al ( 2021) provide evidence that fully automated sociolinguistic analysis is possible: They used ASR to transcribe speech from 352 English speakers.…”