Topics in the Study of the Pragmatic Functions of Phonetic Reduction in Dialog
This work addresses a gap in understanding speech reduction in dialog for linguistics and speech processing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research with technical extensions.
The study tackled the under-explored acoustic properties and pragmatic functions of phonetic reduction in dialog, finding that its correlates include high pitch, wide pitch range, and intensity, and developing a baseline model that achieves correlations of 0.24 for English and 0.17 for Spanish with human perceptions.
Reduced articulatory precision is common in speech, but for dialog its acoustic properties and pragmatic functions have been little studied. We here try to remedy this gap. This technical report contains content that was omitted from the journal article (Ward et al. 2024, submitted). Specifically, we here report 1) lessons learned about annotating for perceived reduction, 2) the finding that, unlike in read speech, the correlates of reduction in dialog include high pitch, wide pitch range, and intensity, and 3) a baseline model for predicting reduction in dialog, using simple acoustic/prosodic features, that achieves correlations with human perceptions of 0.24 for English, and 0.17 for Spanish. We also provide examples of additional possible pragmatic functions of reduction in English, and various discussion, observations and speculations