THE FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE OF SPEECH SOUNDS IN SPOKEN ENGLISH
Norman R. French, Walter D. Koenig · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1929
This paper gives some of the results of a study of the kind and frequency of occurrence of the words of telephone conversations, and the analysis of these words into the simple sounds of speech. The material for this study was obtained on typical toll circuits terminating in the City of New York. The process of noting the words of the conversations was carried out in the following manner. During one week the observer recorded nothing but the nouns used, during another week she recorded only the verbs; similarly for the other parts of speech. The observations were continued until data had been obtained on 500 conversations for each part of speech. With this method the results are, of course, not identical with those which would have been obtained had the entire conversations been recorded. It is likely, too, that some words were missed by the observer.