Fricatives in conversational vs. read speech in mid-Western American English

Abstract

The present study examines the acoustic characteristics of fricatives across two corpora from mid-Western American English. Our goal is to determine (i) the range of acoustic variation in the production of fricatives in conversational vs. read speech, and (ii) the type and extent of individual variation schemes demonstrated by the speakers. The study surveys over 100,000 fricative tokens from the conversational Buckeye Corpus (Pitt et al. 2005) and the read speech TIMIT Corpus (Zue and Seneff 1988). We test an extensive list of acoustic measures compiled on the basis of prior work with laboratory data (incl. duration, center of gravity, skew, kurtosis, peak power, etc.) and explore the implications of the findings for our understanding of the group and individual patterning of speech production processes across the two different speech styles.