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The validity of phonetic transcription: Limitations of a sociolinguistic research tool

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Paul Kerswill  and
Susan Wright
Paul Kerswill
Affiliation:
University of Reading
Susan Wright
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Abstract

Auditory phonetic transcription is a stock-in-trade of sociolinguists; it is transcriptions, not actual speech, that form the raw data of much of sociolinguistics. Given its importance, it is surprising that phonetic transcription has rarely been examined by sociolinguists from the point of view of its validity and its reliability — despite the existence of a certain amount of discussion in the phonetic literature. Rather, it has been treated as a pretheoretical notion. In this article, we report an experiment that compares the auditory transcriptions of trained phoneticians with physiological data on the same utterances, using the technique of electropalatography. The experiment shows that (a) there are intervening factors of a psycho-acoustic nature that impinge on a phonetician's transcription, thus affecting validity; and (b) there is considerable inconsistency, both between phoneticians and between a single phonetician's different attempts at transcribing the same token. Both of these latter factors show that a high degree of reliability cannot be assumed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , October 1990 , pp. 255 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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