INTOXICATED SPEECHJoe Makhluf & Chelsea Fink

Overview• Motivation: Alcohol slows the motor skills, so it is our

intuition that the articulators would become slower, causing differences in drunk vs. sober speech

• Question: How does alcohol affect /s/, /sh/, and /z/?

• Method: Record subjects reading a passage sober, then get them drunk and have them read the same passage.

• Results: /s/, /sh/, and /z/ show minor lengthening in duration in all positions of intoxicated speech. Amplitude differences not consistent, and /s/ does not appear like /sh/ on spectrograms.

• Conclusions: Intoxication does affect speech, but effects vary from person to person

Background

• Pisoni & Martin (1989): Performed an acoustic and perceptual experiment with sober and intoxicated speech. Found that police officers and college students could identify sober vs. intoxicated speech when presented in an isolated environment.

• Tanford, Pisoni, & Johnson (1991): Studied several samples of a ship captain saying “Exxon Valdez” to see if acoustic cues are suitable evidence for intoxication. They found that pitch, variability, and duration can be used to make a strong case for intoxication (when stress and fatigue can be ruled out).

Background: Continued

• Biadsy, Wang, Rosenberg, & Hirschberg (2011): Researched which speech qualities are impacted by intoxication. Found that prosody alone cannot determine whether or not an individual is intoxicated, and more focus must be put on phone duration and phonotactic features.

• Heigl (2013): Studied the behavior of /s/ in sober and intoxicated speech, and found that the palatalization of /s/ (or slurred speech) is not random.

Hypothesis:

• Alcohol and intoxication impair a variety of things including:

• Balance

• Coordination

• Judgment

• Vision

• And many more…

• How does intoxication affect our production of /s/, /sh/, and /z/? Does /s/ palatalize and become more like /sh/ in drunk speech?

Method

• Subjects: 3 women, 5 men

• Ages: 23-31

• Different ethnic backgrounds

• All native speakers of English

•

• Before stimulus was introduced:

• We took note of each subject’s ideal Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) from brad21.org

• The ideal BAC for drunken speech is .11-.18

Method: Continued

• Recording:

• Subjects answered several questions:

• 1. How many drinks have you had (to track consumption)

• 2. Where are you from?

• 3. What is your favorite day of the week?

• 4. How was the weather today?

• (Questions 2-4 were included in hopes of obtaining unscripted /s/, /sh/, or /z/ for comparison. However, they were not included in our analysis.)

• After questions, subjects were asked to read the following aloud, at their own pace…

Method: Continued

• Stimuli:

• “Hooray for Monday. Time to kick off the sheets, clear out the cobwebs, and kick out the jams. We are ready, willing, and able. Bring us a whole case of the Mondays. We’ll grab a bottle, shake it up, and dance in the champagne shower of awesomeness. While the drones dread Monday, we see it as a starting line for dreamers and doers. There’s a fresh week of days on the clock and countless possibilities for our boundless potential. We’re relaxed, recharged, and reloaded. Ready to tackle the work we were born to do. Ready to create something remarkable. This is not the day to be back at the grindstone, this is the day to be back at our passion, breathing new life into our projects. We are conduits of innovation, imagination, and inspiration. It’s Monday, and we can’t wait to get started. On your mark…get set…“

Method: Continued

• After the first round of recordings, subjects were instructed to consume one drink every thirty minutes.

• The following constitute one drink:

• 1.5 oz of liquor

• 12 oz of beer

• 6 oz of wine

• As each subject reached his or her “ideal” number of drinks (which most actually surpassed), we repeated the same procedure for the 2nd recording: 4 questions followed by reading the passage at their own pace

• **all subjects had a designated driver or spent the night – we do not condone drinking and driving!**

Results

• Duration: /s/ & /sh/:

• We looked at the average duration for /s/ & /sh/ in the initial, medial, and final positions. /z/ was only analyzed in the final position.

• The following words were analyzed for each participant:

• Champagne (/sh/ initial)

• Passion (/sh/ medial)

• Fresh (/sh/ final)

• See (/s/ initial)

• Awesomeness (/s/ medial)

• Projects (/s/ final)

• Days (/z/ final)

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Results

• The production of /s/, /sh/, and /z/ were slowed in intoxicated speech, which resulted in a longer duration (as we had anticipated).

• Next: We analyzed the spectrograms of drunk and sober /s/ & /sh/ for each pair:

• Champagne/See (initial)

• Passion/Awesomeness (medial)

• Fresh/Projects (final)

• We were hoping that drunk /s/ would appear more like sober /sh/ on spectrograms, but that hypothesis failed. As you can see…

Spectrogram: Initial /sh/ & /s//sh/ sober

/s/ sober

/sh/ drunk

/s/ drunk

Spectrogram: Medial /s/ & /sh/

/s/ sober

/sh/ sober

/s/ drunk

/sh/ drunk

Spectrogram: Final /sh/ & /s//sh/ sober

/s/ sober

/sh/ drunk

/s/ drunk

Conclusions

• We were able to confirm our hypothesis for /s/, /sh/, and /z/ in almost all of the positions analyzed. With the exception of /s/ in the final position, we did see longer durations in intoxicated speech; final /z/ and /sh/ showing the most significant changes

• Although our study was unable to prove that /s/ palatalizes and behaves more like /sh/ in drunk speech, Barbara Heiglwas able to make some interesting generalizations about the palatalization of drunk /s/ in her paper “[s] Under the Influence of Alcohol.”