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Toward "English" Phonetics: Variability In The Pre-Consonantal Voicing Effect Across English Dialects And Speakers, James Tanner, Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith, Josef Fruehwald

Linguistics Faculty Publications

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 …