Spontaneous versus prepared speech
Jared Bernstein, Gay Baldwin · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1985
Some speakers use different forms when training a speech recognizer than when speaking spontaneously to the device—this could be called “enrollment diglossia.” As a preliminary study of this phenomenon, we compared selected phonological and prosodic features of spontaneous speech to read and recited versions of the same sentences and paragraphs. Three subjects were interviewed and were later asked to read or memorize and recite, at various nominal rates, portions of the material that they had originally spoken spontaneously. We made detailed measurements of /t/ allophonics, speech rate, and the forms of certain words. For some speakers, there are considerable differences between spontaneous and prepared renditions; e.g., one speaker produced 45% vs 18% of /t/s as flaps, another speaker varies local speech rate and produces more nonsyntactic pauses in spontaneous paragraphs, and one speaker invokes “fast speech” forms at slower speech rates for spontaneous speech than for prepared speech. [Work supported by DARPA.]