Reliability of International Phonetic Alphabet Transcriptions ...

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Abstract

Phonetic transcription is a clinical tool that speech-language pathologists (SLP) use when transcribing speech of individuals with phonetic or phonological difficulties. Through spontaneous language samples, SLPs must examine each statement by analyzing them into segmental units. The purpose of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription is to ensure the reliable reproduction of oral productions. Given the lack of recent studies on IPA transcription, and the increased availability of websites and applications that purport to reliably transcribe speech, it seems important to study the reliability of these computer generated IPA transcriptions. More specifically, we seek to establish the phonetic variations of English phonemes between applications or websites, and to examine the differences in the phonetic transcription of phonemes of the same sample produced from these different websites and applications. Our study is based on the analysis of eight applications and four websites. A language sample containing all the sounds of the English language was first created, then captured in each website/application to examine the reliability of these sites/tools with respect to IPA. Results revealed that most of the consonants were constant except for [v] and there was more variability in the transcription of the vowels, as expected. Variations indicated may impact intervention goals and clinical judgment of SLPs who choose these sites/tools as their preferred method of phonetic transcription.