THE WORDS AND SOUNDS OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION 3l7 



nection with Fig. 3, line 2. The vowel weighting reflects the enhanced 

 importance of the "e" in "pen" from the verbs "get," "tell," "send" 

 and shows a considerable reduction in the vowel in "pool," largely 

 from the loss of "you" and "to." The unstressed vowels, especially 

 as in "about" are also diminished. Among the final consonants the 

 largest change is a reduction in "z," which results from the elimination 

 of "is," "was," "as," etc. Comparing the distributions of Table VIII 

 and Table X as a whole, however, both show about the same degree of 

 non-uniformity; the maximum and minimum weightings do not differ 

 greatly. 



One more type of analysis is given in Table XI. In this case the 

 sounds of each word are weighted by the number of conversations in 

 which the word occurred, instead of by the total number of times the 

 word was used. This seems to be a somewhat radical change in 

 method, involving, as it does, a considerable reduction in the weighting 

 of the words at the head of the list. When the effect of eliminating 

 the first 100 words entirely, shown in Fig. 3, line 3, is recalled, large 

 changes might be expected. Actually the result is remarkably similar 

 to the figures of Table VIII. The relatively diminished importance of 

 "you" and "to" is seen in the vowel list, of "you" again among the 

 initial consonants, and of "it," "that" and "get" in the list of final 

 consonants. The range covered by the relative weightings is still 

 much the same as in Tables VIII and X, 



Comparisons with Written English 



Some of the differences between the vocabularies of telephone 

 conversation and written English have been pointed out. The effects 

 of these differences may be seen in the relative occurrence of the sounds 

 as shown by Figures 4, 5 and 6 for vowels, initial consonants and final 

 consonants, respectively, using the analysis based on all the words 

 (except articles). The upper line in each case is a graphical representa- 

 tion of the corresponding data of Table VIII, after certain changes have 

 been made to put them on the same basis as the tables given by Dewey 

 for written English. In the case of the consonants the only change 

 needed was omission of the compound consonants. In the case of the 

 vowels it was necessary to combine some of our classifications, since 

 Dewey made but 17 distinctions among the vowels. We believe the 

 combinations made are those followed by Dewey himself, as ascer- 

 tained from examples given by him in his text. The phonetic symbols 

 given in Figure 4 are those used by him. The combinations made were 

 as follows: "pen" and "wanted"; "pane" and "pair"; "pin," "pos- 

 sible" and "receive"; "pun" and "purr"; "about," "differ," "peop/g" 

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