Functional data analysis as a tool for analyzing speech dynamics - a case study on the French word c'était

In this paper we introduce Functional Data Analysis (FDA) as a tool for analyzing dynamic transitions in speech signals. FDA makes it possible to perform statistical analyses of sets of math­ ematical functions in the same way as classical multivariate analysis treats scalar measurement data. We illustrate the use of FDA with a reduction phenomenon affecting the French word c ’etait /se ts/ ‘it was’, which can be reduced to [sts] in conver­ sational speech. FDA reveals that the dynamics of the transition from [s] to [t] in fully reduced cases may still be different from the dynamics of [s] [t] transitions in underlying /st/ clusters such as in the word stage.