Were we or are we? Perception of reduced function words in spontaneous conversations.

Abstract

Spontaneous, reduced pronunciations diverge greatly from citation forms. The quality of a single segment can change, e.g., /b/ in “about” surfacing as an approximant. But sounds, syllables, and entire words can also be deleted (e.g., “do you have time?” as [djutEm] with no acoustic trace of “have”). This work investigates the perception of reduced function words such as “he was” or “we were.” Twenty-two young American English speakers’ spontaneous conversations with close acquaintances were recorded. From these, we selected utterances containing items such as “he’s/he was, we’re/we were, got him/got them.” When hearing an entire utterance, native listeners may clearly perceive “we were,” but on hearing just the “we were” portion, they perceive an unambiguous “we’re.” The portion of the signal presented to listeners is manipulated to determine the contributions of local acoustic cues, speech rate and coarticulation, semantic and syntactic information, and overall bias toward present vs past tense. An auditory and a written task are also compared to separate the contribution of intonation from that of syntax/semantics. These results begin to elucidate the interplay of information sources listeners draw upon when parsing spontaneous speech. Future work will compare to non-native listeners’ perceptions.