Corpora analyses of frequency of schwa deletion in conversational American English.

This study utilized two conversational speech databases to generate statistics about the frequency of occurrence of schwa deletion. Overall, the results showed a low frequency of schwa deletion in conversational American English. We investigated a number of factors that could have a potential effect on the propensity to delete schwa. The most pervasive factor was stress environment (pre-stress vs. post-stress), which showed a greater frequency of schwa deletion in the post-stress environment. The results are discussed with reference to processing spoken words and the role for corpus statistics in constraining models of word recognition. Copyright 2003 S. Karger AG, Basel