Exploring Graph Theory Methods for the Analysis of Pronunciation Variation in Spontaneous Speech

Given the development of automatic speech recognition based techniques for creating phonetic annotations of large speech corpora, there has been a growing interest in investigating the frequencies of occurrence of phonological and reduction processes. Given that most studies have analyzed these processes separately, they did not provide insights about their co-occurrences. This paper contributes with introducing graph theory methods for the analysis of pronunciation variation in a large corpus of Austrian German conversational speech. More specifically, we investigate how reduction processes that are typical for spontaneous German in general co-occur with phonological processes typical for the Austrian German variety. Whereas our concrete findings are of special interest to scientists investigating variation in German, the approach presented opens new possibilities to analyze pronunciation variation in large corpora of different speaking styles in any language.