Conférence Peggy Renwick

Peggy Renwick (University of Georgia)
The Manifestation of Phonological Processes in Spontaneous Speech
 
Formalizations of phonological processes typically draw on native speaker intuitions and phonetic transcriptions, but by using large speech corpora we can better understand how pronunciation patterns are realized in spontaneous speech. In this talk I present instrumental studies of phonological processes, drawing acoustic data from the Audio British National Corpus, a large corpus of spoken English that is freely available for linguistic research. In each case, I examine pairs of words, to focus on a phonological alternation affecting word-final consonants. I will discuss how word-final palatalization in phrases like miss you is affected by lexical frequency; and I will show that contra traditional descriptions, nasal consonants can assimilate across word boundaries at all places of articulation, not just the alveolar. Together these results illustrate the use of new methods and data sources to improve phonological theory and modeling.