A signiicant new speech corpus of British English has been recorded at Cambridge University. Derived from the Wall Street Journal text corpus, WSJCAM0 constitutes one of the largest corpora of spoken British English currently in existence. It has been speciically designed for the construction and evaluation of speaker-independent speech recognition systems. The database consists of 140 speakers...

Duration features have been thought to be the most obvious correlates of speech rhythm. Previous studies have shown that they can be used to distinguish among some world's languages. This paper investigates to what extent the methods employed in these studies can be applied to the dialects of British English. We have tested whether a set of variables derived from automatically extracted duratio...

It has been known for some time that the acoustic parameters of vowels and consonants change as a result oftheimmediate segmental environment (ref 1 & 2); and indeed, it has been claimed that an interconsonantal vowel is imposed on and only slightly modifies a continuous movement from the initial to the final consonants (ref 3). Whatever the extent of such coarticulatory effects, it is reasonab...

Recent work by Nerbonne and Wiersma (2006) has provided a foundation for measuring syntactic differences between corpora. It uses part-of-speech trigrams as an approximation to syntactic structure, comparing the trigrams of two corpora for statistically significant differences. This paper extends the method and its application. It extends the method by using leafpath ancestors of Sampson (2000)...

The English perfect construction involves the perfect auxiliary HAVE followed by a verb in the past participle form. It occurs in several subtypes according to the inflectional form of the auxiliary. The most frequently occurring is the present perfect, as in She has seen them. The other subtypes are the past perfect (She had seen them), the infinitival perfect (She must have seen them), and th...

This paper is an analysis of narratives in British English conversation. It shows that prosody and gestures made by the speaker align to the pragmatic structure of narratives and are especially used to distinguish the climax, e.g. the point of the narrative. Indeed I will show that the climax is most of the time uttered with a slower speech rate and higher voice intensity than the rest of the n...

This paper attempts to translate two phonological models of prosodic structure into quantitative predictions which can be empirically tested on a large corpus of spoken English. Specifically the Abercrombie/Halliday model of the stressfoot is compared to the Jassem model of (narrow) rhythm unit and anacrusis. The data analysed was a five and a half hour corpus of spoken English (Aix-Marsec). Pr...

Previous research has found that listeners understand talkers who speak with the same accent as themselves better than others. The aim of the current study was to investigate how speech intelligibility is modulated by this talker-listener accent interaction when native and non-native listeners hear spontaneous speech. To this end, native Southern British English listeners and native Korean list...

OBJECTIVES To investigate if language spoken at home mediates the relationship between ethnicity and doctor-patient communication for South Asian and White British patients. METHODS We conducted secondary analysis of patient experience survey data collected from 5870 patients across 25 English general practices. Mixed effect linear regression estimated the difference in composite general prac...