Acoustic variability in spontaneous conversational speech of American English talkers

Abstract

Speaker variability strongly impacts human perception and technology performance, yet large-scale, systematic studies of the acoustic characteristics involved are rarely undertaken. This study provides statistics on selected segmental and suprasegmental acoustic parameters from measures made on spontaneous conversational telephone speech from 160 speakers in the Switchboard Corpus. Since spontaneous conversational speech is more dynamically variable than read speech representative of actual human communication, it was preferred for our applied research purposes.