Blackwell Reference Online

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Variability in speech comes in many forms: within-speaker variability, cross-speaker variability, segment realization variability, and word environment variability as well as numerous others (Klatt, 1989). The traditional approach to the study of speech perception and spoken language processing has been to ignore these important sources of phonetic variability and to rely on abstract phonemic descriptions that are immune to variability across utterances, talkers, and contexts. A different approach, however, is to recognize that these sources of variability are natural consequences of language variation and investigate how variation and variability are processed in speech perception. This second alternative espouses the notion that variation in speech matters and that listeners can and do encode details of the indexical properties of the speech signal as a routine part of the normal speech perception process (Pisoni, 1993, 1997).Fifty years ago, Peterson and Barney (1952) recorded 33 men, 28 women, and 15 children reading two lists of 10 [hVd] syllables. They took first and second formant frequency measurements for each of the vowels produced by each of the talkers. A scatterplot of the F1 values by the F2 values for each talker revealed a vowel space containing large overlapping ellipses for each of the 10 vowels. In their discussion of these findings, Peterson and Barney pointed ... log in or subscribe to read full text