BALTIMORE — Talk may be cheap, but that doesn’t keep people from budgeting their speech.
When talking casually, people routinely streamline their utterances by dropping segments, syllables and even whole words, researchers reported April 20 at the spring meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Insights into these conversational shortcuts could improve the learning and teaching of second languages. They could also help scientists design better speech recognition programs, which are typically attuned to carefully enunciated words, not everyday talk. “Most of the speech we communicate with is not careful speech at all,” said Natasha Warner, director of the Douglass Phonetics Lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “You try and give this stuff to a speech recognition program, and it totally goes to pieces.”