Tanner James, Sonderegger Morgan, Stuart-Smith Jane, Fruehwald Josef
Department of Linguistics, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
Front Artif Intell. 2020 May 29;3:38. doi: 10.3389/frai.2020.00038. eCollection 2020.
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., vs. ) 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.
获取口语语料库和语音处理工具开发方面的最新进展，使得开展“大规模”语音和社会语言学研究成为可能。本研究展示了这种大规模方法的实用性——利用来自多个语料库、涵盖一系列英语方言的数据，并通过SPADA项目进行收集和分析——来考察辅音前浊音化效应（例如在 与 中，浊音前的元音比清塞音前的元音更长）在自然口语中是如何实现的，以及在不同方言和个体说话者之间如何变化。与之前关于受控实验室语音的报告相比，研究发现浊音化效应在自然口语中要小得多，但仍然受到预期语音因素范围的影响。英语方言在浊音化效应的大小上存在很大差异，而个体说话者相对于其特定方言的差异则很小。本研究证明了大规模语音研究作为增进我们对语音变异性结构理解的一种手段的价值，并说明了像在SPADA项目中开展的那些大规模研究如何能够应用于语音和社会语言学研究中的其他问题。
