The Words and Sounds of Telephone Conversations 



By NORMAN R. FRENCH, CHARLES W. CARTER, JR., 

 and WALTER KOENIG, JR. 



This paper presents data concerning the vocabulary and the relative fre- 

 quency of occurrence of the speech sounds of telephone conversation. 

 Tables are given showing the most frequently used words, the syllabic struc- 

 ture of the words, the relative occurrences of the sounds, and, for each vowel, 

 the percentage distribution of the consonants which precede and follow it. 

 Comparisons are made with the vocabulary and relative occurrence of speech 

 sounds in written English. 



Introduction 



CONVERSATION resembles other forms of communication in its 

 use of symbols, in themselves merely physical phenomena, but 

 which combined in sequence are by convention endowed with meaning. 

 The elementary symbols used in conversation are the acoustic dis- 

 turbances called speech sounds. A language is characterized by the 

 speech sounds which it uses and by the combinations of speech sounds 

 which form syllables and words. The physical description of a lan- 

 guage involves a statement of the characteristics of the individual 

 sounds and also of the frequency of occurrence of each sound and 

 combination of sounds. The latter or statistical aspect of conversation 

 is treated in this paper. ^ 



Studies of the relative frequency of English speech sounds have been 

 made previously, but they have been confined, so far as the writers 

 have ascertained, to the analysis of written matter. Of these an 

 extended investigation is that made by Godfrey Dewey. ^ For peda- 

 gogical purposes in connection with difficulties in spelling and in 

 developing methods of shorthand writing, which seem to have been 

 the aims in the previous studies, written matter is the natural point 

 of departure. 



There are obvious differences between English when read aloud from 

 printed matter and English used as a medium of conversation, which 

 might be expected to produce differences between analyses based on the 

 two forms. Written matter is permanent and, to some degree, self- 

 conscious; it receives qualification by dependent clauses and preposi- 



1 Some of the results of this study were presented at the May, 1929, meeting of the 

 Acoustical Society of America. See French and Koenig, JourjialA. S. of A., October, 

 1929, p. 110. 



' " Relative Frequency of English Speech Sounds," Harvard Studies in Education, 

 IV. Harvard University Press, 1923. 



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