Specifying/quantifying variation in pronunciation

[Bruce Lambert]

Hi folks,

I am new to this list.

I study medication errors involving confusions between similar-looking and
similar-sounding drug names. At the moment, I am designing a study of the
effects of phonological similarity on auditory perceptual errors. (The idea
being that words with lots of phonological "neighbors" are more likely to
be misperceived than words with few such neighbors.) One criticism I have
received from people who have reviewed my design is that I have not
adequately dealt with variability in pronunciation that may result from
different regional dialects, accents, and English-as-a-second-language
issues. After all, health professionals in the U.S are a very diverse lot.

My question is this, is it possible to use a corpus of phonologically
transcribed speech to quantify and specify the type of variation I'm
talking about? (One would need lots of diverse speakers speaking the same
words.) Which specific corpus would be appropriate? Has this already been
done? Is variation typically limited to certain phonemes, while others are
dialect- or accent-invariant? Given the "standard English" phonological
transcription of a word, is it possible to transform it, in a rule-based
manner, to reflect different regional dialects or foreign language
accents?  Can you point me to relevant references?

Thanks in advance!

-bruce

P.S. A few references to my work, if you're curious:

         Lambert, B. L., Chang, K. Y., & Lin, S. J. (2001). Descriptive
analysis of the drug name lexicon. Drug Information Journal, 35, 163-172.
         Lambert, B. L., Chang, K. Y., & Lin, S. J. (2001). Effect of
orthographic and phonological similarity on false recognition of drug
names. Social Science & Medicine, 52, 1843-1857.
         Lambert, B. L., Donderi, D., & Senders, J. (in press). Assessing
the subjective similarity of drug names. Psychology and Marketing.
         Lambert, B. L., Lin, S.-J., Gandhi, S. K., & Chang, K.-Y. (1999).
Predicting and preventing drug name confusion errors: A summary of
findings. In A. L. Scheffler & L. A. Zipperer (Eds.), Proceedings of
Enhancing Patient Safety and Reducing Errors in Health Care (pp. 221-225).
Rancho Mirage, CA: National Patient Safety Foundation.
         Lambert, B. L., Lin, S.-J., Gandhi, S. K., & Chang, K.-Y. (1999).
Similarity as a risk factor in drug name confusion errors: The look-alike
(orthographic) and sound-alike (phonological) model. Medical Care, 37(12),
1214-1225.