Structure in talker-specific phonetic realisation

The present study provides evidence that variation across talkers in the realization of American English stop consonants is highly structured. Our findings support a uniformity constraint on the talker-specific realization of a phonetic property, such as glottal spreading, that is shared by multiple speech sounds.

As uniformity implies mutual predictability, the findings also shed light on listeners' ability to generalize knowledge of a novel talker from one stop consonant to another. Structured variation of the kind investigated here indicates a relatively low-dimensional encoding of talker-specific phonetic realization in both speech production and speech perception.

Structure in talker-specific phonetic realization: Covariation of stop consonant VOT in American English. (Journal of Phonetics, 61, 30-47.)

Eleanor Chodroff and Colin Wilson. 2017.