Long- and short-term within-speaker differences in the formants of Australian hello

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a forensic phonetic experiment which investigates the nature of long- and short-term within-speaker differences in the F-pattem of the same word hello said by six similar-sounding male speakers of Australian English. Short-term differences are obtained from recordings separated by about one minute, long-term differences from recordings separated by at least a year. Within-spcaker variation in the centre frequencies of the first four formants at well-defined points in the word is quantified by ANOVA, Scheffé's F and Euclidean distances. Very few significant differences occur in either the long- or short-term, and they appear largely random. Bom long- and short-term mean within-speaker differences are shown to be less than the corresponding mean between-speaker differences. Implications of the findings are discussed and directions for future research are outlined.