Elision in spontaneous speech (based on English)

The current paper focuses on flexibility of phonemic patterns of morphemes and words as a result of elision in English. Spontaneous speech of 6 subjects, male, aged 34-50, was analyzed: 3 speakers of American English (AE) and 3 speakers of Canadian English (CE) without any notable features of belonging to a particular dialect within the US and Canada. The total of 51,384 occurrences of consonants and vowels were studied: 33,368 American consonants, 8,021 American vowels and 9,995 Canadian vowels. The following common patterns of consonant and vowel elision were found. Both in AE and CE there was predominantly syncope-type vowel elision. In AE /t/ and /d/ consonant elisions were among the most frequent. /d/-elision was mostly of apocope type with very rare exceptions. Both apocope and syncope type elision of /t/ occurred in AE with the former being more frequent; sometimes apocope and syncope occurred in one word simultaneously. Other typical elision cases in AE included apocope of /v/ and /f/, syncope of /h/; other cases were much less frequent. Compared to earlier studies of German spontaneous speech where fore-lingual /n/, /t/, and /d/ accounted for 80 % of all consonant elision cases that occurred to a great extent in high frequency function words (cf. Guseva, 1985), in AE more notional words were involved in consonant elision. In addition, in AE syncope of consonants turned out much more frequent than in German. Both in AE and CE /э/, /и/, /i/ were elided most frequently, all syncope-type, while /i/ was elided much less frequently and turned out the only case of apocope. Besides common tendencies, there were certain specific features noticed concerning the spectrum of sounds elided and the frequency of their elision. For instance, /u/-elision ranked number two in CE was not found in AE. The perceptual study of segments with elision was performed using the material of American English only. Two experiments were carried out with two different discrimination tasks: first, listen to the stimuli and write them down using the English alphabet, second, listen to the stimuli and choose the number of syllables really pronounced. During the first task, in most cases in limited contexts (parts of words of CVC or VCV type mostly with only two words given as a whole: probably and popular with 3 sound syncope in each) the canonical phonemic pattern was not perceived by the native speakers. When given the second discrimination task, the native speakers could generally perceive the reduction of the number of syllables in the words as a result of elision.

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