Corpora Analyses of Frequency of Schwa Deletion in Conversational American English
Authors:
- Paul C. LoCastoPLPaul C. LoCasto
- Cynthia M. ConnineCCCynthia M. Connine
- 1 March 2003
- journal article
- Published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH in Phonetica
- Vol. 60 (1) , 45-69
Abstract
This study utilized two conversational speech databases to generate statistics about the frequency of occurrence of schwa deletion. Overall, the results showed a low frequency of schwa deletion in conversational American English. We investigated a number of factors that could have a potential effect on the propensity to delete schwa. The most pervasive factor was stress environment (pre-stress vs. post-stress), which showed a greater frequency of schwa deletion in the post-stress environment. The results are discussed with reference to processing spoken words and the role for corpus statistics in constraining models of word recognition.Keywords
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