Recording and environmental effects in sociolinguistic interviews: Implications for sociophonetic analysis

Abstract

Sociophonetians are often interested in examining speech that has been recorded in acoustically diverse conditions. Sociolinguistic methodology is centrally concerned with combating the observer’s paradox, finding ways to minimize informant’s awareness that they are under investigation, and often the requirements needed to ensure high-quality recordings conflict with this theoretical focus. While sociophoneticians are aware of some potential problems when comparing different speakers, with only rare exceptions have they examined the potential problems on both inter- and intraspeaker analyses due to recording and environmental effects. Meanwhile, other fields (especially computer speech recognition) have investigated the acoustic effects of environmental noise and recording equipment and have demonstrated that these factors impact the resulting speech signals in ways that are possibly significant for sociophonetics. This study emulates a number of traditional sociolinguistic interview recording techniques by taking an array of recordings for single interviews. Each interview is simultaneously recorded with a wired lavalier microphone connected to an audiocassette recorder, a unidirectional vocal microphone placed 2 ft from the speaker connected to an audiocassette recorder, and a wireless lavalier to a digital video camera. The results of phonetic analyses of these recordings, along with the implications for sociophonetic analysis, are explored.