Regional variation in West Yorkshire filled pauses: Implications for forensic speaker comparisons

In the current linguistic literature, West Yorkshire (a county in Northern England) has received relatively little commentary, as it is often overshadowed by other bigger regions and cities like Manchester or Newcastle-upon-Tyne. However, in forensic phonetics, literature on regional variation is often vital to forensic casework. Sociophonetic studies aid forensic phoneticians in making judgments regarding whether speaker characteristics are typical of a region or not. For both forensic and sociophonetic motivations, this paper begins to look at the variation present in West Yorkshire by analyzing variation in filled pauses across speaking styles from three boroughs within West Yorkshire (Bradford, Kirklees, and Wakefield) from the West Yorkshire Regional English Database (WYRED; Gold et al., 2016). This paper analyses 60 speakers from WYRED. All speakers are male, aged 18-30, and English is their first and only language. This study measures the vocalic portion of all “uh” /V/ and “um” /V + N/ productions in over 8,000 tokens across four different tasks. Filled pauses were manually segmented in Praat and F1, F2, and F3 midpoints were extracted. Results suggest that filled pauses may be influenced by speaking style, but more importantly the three regions exhibit some significant differences in their filled pause realizations.