Connected and Citation Speech

This video just has a plain transcript, not time-aligned to the videoThis video will introduce the concept of connected speech with relation to the idea of citation forms. We will look at spectrograms and waveforms of speech in both citation and connected forms and consider the differences between these forms.
Transcription is a classic tool of linguistic description and analysis, but it imposes an artificial segmentation onto the continuous stream of speech. In fact, speech sounds overlap and bleed into one another during production, like “coloured eggs crushed on a conveyer”. This metaphor captures the idea that speech sounds are not discrete but instead influence those around them while gradually fading from one to another. We can use acoustic tools such as spectrograms to visualize and describe the speech sounds and to infer articulatory settings, but the often overlap to such an extent that it is difficult, if not impossible to independently identify one speech sound from another.
The style of speech can effect how clearly the individual sounds can be identified. The clearest forms of words are known as citation forms, but these forms typically do not occur in natural connected speech.
Citation forms are words spoken in isolation, in their fullest, most emphatic phonetic form. These forms are often used to exemplify and describe allophonic variation that occurs in surface forms. These forms are somewhat artificial in that spoken language is not made up of a string of discrete words. Connected forms, on the other hand, are spoken in natural utterances. Their forms are highly variable and depend on multiple factors such as sentence structure, speech rate and speech style. The variability of speech in connected utterances is visible in the acoustic representations that we’ve been looking at in the acoustic phonetics module.
Here we have an example of two utterances of the word solicitor, once in isolation, and once in a connected utterance. Let’s use what we’ve learned in acoustic phonetics to compare and contrast these forms.
The first thing that I notice when I look at these two spectrograms is that the citation form is considerably longer than the connected form. Now let’s look more closely at the individual speech sounds we can identify in the acoustics. The first things that jump out to me are the fricatives. I can identify them because they are intervals of aperiodic vibration in the waveform, and regions of high amplitude across a diffuse range high in the frequency spectrum. We can see two regions of fricative noise in both the citation and the connected speech form.
We can continue to compare the acoustic forms of these words, relating it to what we expect to see based on the phonemic form. In the citation form, I can identify regions of the spectrogram that correspond to each of the phonemic segments in the phonemic form.
However, if we look at the connected speech form, it is not as easy to align a phonetic transcription with the acoustic output.
In fact, we might say that some of the sounds have been deleted or removed somewhere between the phonemic representation and the phonetic output. Here I have highlighted the second fricative in both productions in blue, as well as the following segments. In the citation form, the vowel following the fricative, highlighted in red, is clearly visible, while in the connected form, it is has been omitted entirely. The following closure of the /t/ sounds, highlighted in green, is present in both sounds, but it is much shorter in the connected speech form than in the citation form.
In future videos we will consider why these differences occur, and the linguistic factors that help us to understand them.