Eliciting reduced, citation, and hyperarticulated speech in the laboratory: Acoustic and perceptual analyses

Abstract

A method was developed to elicit sentences in three speech styles (reduced, citation, hyperarticulated) using controlled materials. The reduced style was elicited by having subjects read sentences while, as a distractor task, recalling a digit sequence from short-term memory. In prior work, the digit sequence length was calibrated to the individual subject’s digit span. Using this procedure, a reduced style was elicited from half of the subjects. In this study, the sequence length was set to one additional digit beyond the individual subject’s digit span, in the hope that the more difficult distractor task would consistently elicit a reduced style. The citation style was elicited by having subjects read sentences from a list. The hyperarticulated style was elicited by prompting subjects to reread some sentences again more carefully. Ten subjects were recorded in this experiment. The resulting sentences were acoustically analyzed in terms of sentence duration, keyword duration, and vowel space size. Sentences differing only in style were also presented in a paired comparison test to 35 listeners. The results of both the acoustic analysis and the perception test showed the method was successful in consistently eliciting reduced sentences from 8 subjects, and citation and hyperarticulated sentences from all 10 subjects.