Exploring the acoustic characteristics of individual variation

Abstract

Studies of the acoustic properties of words often analyze a small subset of words across a large population of speakers. Much of the previous research has not investigated the individual variation produced by a single speaker in large sets of words. The present study analyzes the individual variation produced by a male Western Canadian English speaker, who produced 26,800 English words and 9,600 pseudo-words. All pseudo-words were phonotactically licit and were generated using the software package Wuggy (Keuleers & Brysbaert, 2010). Each word has been force-aligned using the Penn Forced Aligner (Yuan & Liberman, 2008) and then hand corrected by trained phoneticians. We investigate the formant space, word pitch contours, segmental duration, and other acoustic characteristics relevant to classes of segments (such as center of gravity for fricatives). An acoustic comparison is performed between the words and pseudo-words. We explore the acoustic variation of the individual segments produced by this speaker and investigate his individual speech patterns. Finally, we consider the value of delving deeply into productions of a single speaker rather than relying on averaged summaries across a sample a large sample.