Acoustic‐phonetic variability and the mental image of a word

The speaker’s articulatory gestures intended to represent a word are supposed to show relatively high variability in spontaneous speech. The word forms may be stored as abstract phonological representations or else they may be characterized by detailed acoustic-phonetic patterns. The aim of this paper is to show the acoustic-phonetic patterns of the Hungarian word akkor (at that time). Ten speakers’ recorded spontaneous speech with a total duration of 255 minutes and containing 286 occurrences of akkor were submitted to analysis. Durational and frequency patterns were measured by means of the PRAAT software. The results obtained show higher variability both within and across speakers than it had been expected. Both the durations of the words and those of the speech sounds, as well as the vowel formants, turned out to be significantly different across speakers. In addition, the results showed considerable individual differences as well. The correspondence between variability in the objective acoustic-phonetic data and the flexibility and adaptive nature of the mental image of a word will be discussed.