Eliciting speech styles in the laboratory: Assessment of a new experimental method
James D. Harnsberger, David B. Pisoni, RICHARD A. WRIGHT · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2000
This study concerned the development of a method of eliciting controlled stimulus materials, namely sentences, varying in three speech styles: reduced, citation, and hyperarticulated. Such a method would prove useful in studying the acoustics and perception of speech styles. The reduced style was elicited by having subjects read sentences while carrying out a distractor task that involved recalling a digit sequence from short-term memory. The length of the sequence was calibrated to the individual subject via a digit span task administered prior to elicitation. It was hoped that the distractor task, serving as a cognitive load, would result in a less monitored, more naturalistic style. The citation style was elicited by having subjects read sentences from a list. The hyperarticulated style was elicited in a similar manner, except that subjects were prompted on some trials to reread the sentence again more carefully. Twelve subjects were recorded in this experiment, and the resulting sentences were acoustically analyzed and perceptually tested in a pairwise comparison task. The results showed that half of the talkers produced reduced sentences that differed acoustically and perceptually from citation sentences, while all 12 subjects produced hyperarticulated sentences that were differentiable from all others.