A comparison of vowel devoicing/deletion phenomena in English laboratory speech and German spontaneous speech*

This paper continues the examination of deletion, reduction, and reorganization phenomena in spontaneous German speech1and adduces data from English laboratory speech to establish cross-linguistic similarities between vowel deletion in German and vowel devoicing in English. We describe how two sets of data were gathered: one of Standard Southern British English (S.S.B.E.) that establishes the ground-rules of devoicing in that accent; and one of spontaneous German speech gathered in the framework of the Verbmobil project, which mirror the English findings. A further aim of the paper is to show how the corpus can be exploited using relatively simple search techniques.