Book contents
- Worldwide Perspectives on English Usage
- Worldwide Perspectives on English Usage
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section 1Usage Variation and Codification
- Section 2Usage Variation amid Social Diversity and Political Change
- Section 3Corpus-Based Research on Variable Usage in Place and Medium
- 10Non-standard Morphosyntactic Features in Colloquial Australian English
- 11Looking Forward to Meet You
- 12More so/Moreso
- 13Changing Complementation of Antagonistic Protest
- 14Evaluating Three Advanced Methods for Sociophonetic Studies
- 15Triangulating Methods to Investigate Language Variation in Left- and Right-Leaning Australian Twitter (X) Users
- Epilogue
- Index
- References
14 - Evaluating Three Advanced Methods for Sociophonetic Studies
Whisper, LaBB-CAT and PrInDT
from Section 3 - Corpus-Based Research on Variable Usage in Place and Medium
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 June 2026
Book contents
- Worldwide Perspectives on English Usage
- Worldwide Perspectives on English Usage
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section 1Usage Variation and Codification
- Section 2Usage Variation amid Social Diversity and Political Change
- Section 3Corpus-Based Research on Variable Usage in Place and Medium
- 10Non-standard Morphosyntactic Features in Colloquial Australian English
- 11Looking Forward to Meet You
- 12More so/Moreso
- 13Changing Complementation of Antagonistic Protest
- 14Evaluating Three Advanced Methods for Sociophonetic Studies
- 15Triangulating Methods to Investigate Language Variation in Left- and Right-Leaning Australian Twitter (X) Users
- Epilogue
- Index
- References
Summary
Since the early 2000s, various methods for analysing speech data have emerged. While several publications offer strong overviews of methodological innovations, most of them reflect the state of research from over a decade ago. Recent advances in speech technology and statistics relevant to sociophonetic studies have rarely been addressed. This chapter aims to provide an up-to-date overview of three advanced methods for investigating sociophonetic variation, covering both data preparation and analysis, illustrated with a case study on spoken Scottish English. For data preparation, the chapter shows how OpenAI Whisper, an automatic speech recognition model, can transcribe speech and produce outputs compatible with linguistic software. It also discusses how speech annotation tasks can be improved via LaBB-CAT, a tool for corpus management and data mining. For data analysis, the chapter outlines how sociophonetic studies can benefit from advanced statistical methods, including regression and decision tree modelling as well as model evaluation. A key example is the PrInDT package, developed to optimise conditional inference trees as well as classification and regression tasks.
Keywords
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- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Worldwide Perspectives on English UsageInto the Third Millennium, pp. 338 - 358Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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