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This study analyzes the phonetic realizations of English homophones by examining 14,000 tokens from American television news broadcasts. It finds that homophones like "weight" and "wait" exhibit distinct phonetic characteristics that correlate with their meanings in context, even after controlling for duration. The research highlights the effectiveness of time-normalized spectrograms in revealing these differences, challenging traditional reliance on phonetic transcriptions.
Homophones in English are not just phonetically identical; they reveal significant differences in pronunciation that reflect their meanings.
The distribution of spoken word duration of English homophones is known to co-vary with frequency of use. This study investigates whether other aspects of the phonetic realization of homophones also differ. A series of quantitative investigations of 14,000 homophone tokens in American television news broadcasts revealed that the tokens of homophone pairs such as \textit{weight} and \textit{wait} have different phonetic realizations, and that these can be predicted from their meanings in utterance context. These systematic differences remain even when taking duration-related variation into account. Time-normalized spectrograms emerged as an excellent tool for probing the fine details of phonetic realization, and obviate the need for phonetic transcriptions, which inevitably hide the phonetic truth from our eyes.
