Abstract
Recent advances in access to spoken-language corpora and development of speech processing tools have made possible the performance of “large-scale” phonetic and sociolinguistic research. This study illustrates the usefulness of such a large-scale approach—using data from multiple corpora across a range of English dialects, collected, and analyzed with the SPADE project—to examine how the pre-consonantal Voicing Effect (longer vowels before voiced than voiceless obstruents, in e.g., bead vs. beat) is realized in spontaneous speech, and varies across dialects and individual speakers. Compared with previous reports of controlled laboratory speech, the Voicing Effect was found to be substantially smaller in spontaneous speech, but still influenced by the expected range of phonetic factors. Dialects of English differed substantially from each other in the size of the Voicing Effect, whilst individual speakers varied little relative to their particular dialect. This study demonstrates the value of large-scale phonetic research as a means of developing our understanding of the structure of speech variability, and illustrates how large-scale studies, such as those carried out within SPADE, can be applied to other questions in phonetic and sociolinguistic research.
Highlights
There exist a large number of well-studied properties of speech that are known to vary across languages and communities of speakers, which have long been of interest to sociolinguists and phoneticians
The results in this study will be reported in the context of the two main research questions concerning VOICING EFFECT (VE) variability (1) in spontaneous speech, and (2) across English dialects and individual speakers
The strength of evidence for an effect is distinct from the strength of the effect itself: to value the strength of evidence for an effect, we follow the recommendations of Nicenboim and Vasishth (2016) and consider there to be strong evidence of an effect if the 95% credible interval does not include 0, and weak evidence for an effect if 0 is within the 95% credible intervals (CrIs) but the probability of the effect’s direction is at least 95%
Summary
There exist a large number of well-studied properties of speech that are known to vary across languages and communities of speakers, which have long been of interest to sociolinguists and phoneticians. Research within phonetics and sociophonetics is being performed at a larger scale across speech communities (Labov et al, 2006, 2013; Yuan et al, 2006, 2007; Yuan and Liberman, 2014; Coleman et al, 2016; Liberman, 2018), driven by the development of new speech processing tools and data sharing agreements This “large-scale” approach is applied here to one such well-studied variable, the pre-consonantal voicing effect, as a means of characterizing its degree and structure of variability in a single phonetic effect across English dialects and speakers
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