Reduction of English function words in switchboard

Abstract

The causes of pronunciation reduction in 8458 occurrences of ten frequent English function words in a four-hour sample from conversations from the Switchboard corpus were examined. Using ordinary linear and logistic regression models, we examined the length of the words, the form of their vowel (basic, full, or reduced), and final obstruent deletion. For all of these we found strong, independent effects of speaking rate, predictability, the form of the following word, and planning problem disfluencies. The results bear on issues in speech recognition, models of speech production, and conversational analysis.