title: Corpora analyses of frequency of schwa deletion in conversational American English.
abstract: This study utilized two conversational speech databases to generate statistics about the frequency of occurrence of schwa deletion. Overall, the results showed a low frequency of schwa deletion in conversational American English. We investigated a number of factors that could have a potential effect on the propensity to delete schwa. The most pervasive factor was stress environment (pre-stress vs. post-stress), which showed a greater frequency of schwa deletion in the post-stress environment. The results are discussed with reference to processing spoken words and the role for corpus statistics in constraining models of word recognition.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, State University of New York at Binghamton, NY 13902, USA.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Patterson
authors.forename: Paul C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: LoCasto
authors.forename: Cynthia M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Connine
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech; D013068:Speech Production Measurement