The Words and Sounds of Telephone Conversations

C O N V E R S A T I O N resembles other forms of communication in its use of symbols, in themselves merely physical phenomena, but which combined in sequence are by convention endowed with meaning. The elementary symbols used in conversation are the acoustic disturbances called speech sounds. A language is characterized by the speech sounds which it uses and by the combinations of speech sounds which form syllables and words. The physical description of a language involves a statement of the characteristics of the individual sounds and also of the frequency of occurrence of each sound and combination of sounds. The latter or statistical aspect of conversation is treated in this paper.1 Studies of the relative frequency of English speech sounds have been made previously, but they have been confined, so far as the writers have ascertained, to the analysis of written matter. Of these an extended investigation is that made by Godfrey Dewey.2 For pedagogical purposes in connection with difficulties in spelling and in developing methods of shorthand writing, which seem to have been the aims in the previous studies, written matter is the natural point of departure. There are obvious differences between English when read aloud from printed matter and English used as a medium of conversation, which might be expected to produce differences between analyses based on the two forms. Written matter is permanent and, to some degree, selfconscious; it receives qualification by dependent clauses and preposi1 Some of the results of this study were presented at the May, 1929, meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.