2006/09/20

Keating, P. A., Byrd, D., Flemming, E., & Todaka, Y. (1994). Phonetic analyses of word and segment variation using the TIMIT corpus of American English. Speech Communication, 14, 131–142

Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Shelly

This paper reports two studies using the TIMIT corpus. The first study is a transcription study, focusing on the pronunciation variation for the words “the”, which is the most common word in TIMIT. Results showed that phonetic context is an important factor for the pronunciation of “the”. When “the” is followed by a consonant, the vowel in “the” is reduced in both duration and quality (ex. [i] -> central [i]), compared with “the” before a vowel. Also it was found that the occurrence of glottal stops [?] between “the” and vowel-initial word is proportionately higher when the vowel in “the” is a non-high vowel (ex. the wedge), in comparison with “the” with a high vowel (ex. [i]). Another important factor for the pronunciation variation of “the” is speakers’ age. Younger speakers are more likely to pronounce the vowel in “the” as stressed [i] in noncanonical positions than older speakers. The second study concerns acoustic variation in velar stop consonants, testing the effect of preceding and following vowels on the acoustic characteristics of consonants. By measuring the formant transition of vowels at its adjacent point with the velar stops, it was found that velars are about equally affected by vowels on either side. The results of the present research would be very useful in the field of phonetics, speech synthesis and text-to-speech system.