Using Synchronous Speech to Minimize Variability

Many experimental methods seek to minimize phonetic variation, hoping to spare linguistic information and eliminate the paralinguistic, the idiosyncratic and the ”merely” expressive [3]. A conventional technique (phonetic vice clamps) is the use of a frame such as ”say X again” , familiar from many studies. Typically, the underlying assumption is that utterance-to-utterance variability stems from the combination of two independent sources. The first is the linguistic specification of an item (including phonological specification and coarticulatory effects), and the second is a set of non-linguistic factors associated with expressiveness, affect, communicative urgency, channel characteristics and the like. As the first set is of particular interest to the experimental phonetician or the laboratory phonologist, methods are employed which serve to reduce the latter while sparing the former.