Abstract
This study investigates whether the pattern of diachronic sound change within a language variety can predict phonetic variability useful for distinguishing speakers. An analysis of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) monophthongs is undertaken to test whether individuals differ more widely in their realisation of sounds undergoing change than in their realisation of more stable sounds. Read speech of 20 male speakers of SSBE aged 18-25 from the DyViS database is analysed. The vowels , demonstrated by previous research to be changing in SSBE, are compared with the relatively stable . Results from Analysis of Variance and Discriminant Analysis based on F1 and F2 frequencies suggest that although ‘changing’ vowels exhibit greater levels of between-speaker variation than ‘stable’ vowels, they may also exhibit large within-speaker variation, resulting in poorer classification rates. Implications for speaker identification applications are discussed.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Labov, W.: Principles of Linguistic Change. Internal Factors. Blackwell, Oxford (1994)
Moosmüller, S.: Phonological variation in speaker identification. Forensic Linguistics. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 4(1), 29–47 (1997)
Wells, J.C.: A Study of the Formants of the Pure Vowels of British English. Master’s thesis, University College, London (1962)
Wells, J.C.: Accents of English. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1982)
Wells, J.C.: English accents in England. In: Trudgill, P. (ed.) Language in the British Isles, pp. 55–69. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1984)
Gimson, A.C.: Phonetic change and the RP vowel system. In: Abercrombie, D., Fry, D.B., MacCarthy, P.A.D., Scott, N.C., Trim, J.L.M. (eds.) In Honour of Daniel Jones: Papers Contributed on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday. Longman, London, pp. 131–136 (1964)
Gimson, A.C.: An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English, 3rd edn. Edward Arnold, London (1980)
Gimson, A.C.: The rp accent. In: Trudgill, P. (ed.) Language in the British Isles, pp. 45–54. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1984)
Trudgill, P.: Language in the British Isles. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1984)
Trudgill, P.: The Dialects of England. Basil Blackwell, Oxford (1990)
Deterding, D.: Speaker Normalisation for Automatic Speech Recognition. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (1990)
Deterding, D.: The formants of monophthong vowels in Standard Southern British English pronunciation. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 27, 47–55 (1997)
Hughes, A., Trudgill, P.: English Accents and Dialects, 3rd edn. Oxford University Press, New York (1996)
Harrington, J., Palethorpe, S., Watson, C.I.: Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 30(1), 63–78 (2000)
Cruttenden, A.: Gimson’s Pronunciation of English, 6th edn. Arnold, London (2001)
Fabricius, A.: Weak vowels in modern RP: an acoustic study of happy-tensing and kit/schwa shift. Language Variation and Change 14(2), 211–238 (2002)
Hawkins, S., Midgley, J.: Formant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four age-groups of speakers. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 35(2), 183–199 (2005)
Nolan, F., McDougall, K., de Jong, G., Hudson, T.: A forensic phonetic study of ‘dynamic’ sources of variability in speech: the DyViS project. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST ’06), Auckland, Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, pp. 13–18 (2006), available via http://www.assta.org
Boersma, P., Weenink, D.: Praat 4.4.01 (1992-2006), http://www.praat.org
Tabachnick, B.G., Fidell, L.S.: Using Multivariate Statistics. Harper Collins, New York (1996)
Nolan, F.: The Phonetic Bases of Speaker Recognition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1983)
Stevens, K.N.: Acoustic Phonetics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1998)
Carlson, R., Fant, G., Granström, B.: Two-formant models, pitch and vowel perception. In: Fant, G., Tatham, A.A. (eds.) Auditory Analysis and Perception of Speech, pp. 55–82. Academic Press, London (1975)
Nolan, F.: Auditory and acoustic analysis in speaker recognition. In: Gibbons, J. (ed.) Language and the Law, pp. 326–345. Longman, London (1994)
Fant, G.: Speech Sounds and Features. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1973)
Peterson, G.E., Barney, H.L.: Control methods used in a study of the vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 24(2), 175–184 (1952)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
de Jong, G., McDougall, K., Nolan, F. (2007). Sound Change and Speaker Identity: An Acoustic Study. In: Müller, C. (eds) Speaker Classification II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4441. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74122-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74122-0_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74121-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74122-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)