A set of phonetic studies based on analysis of the TIMIT speech database is presented which addresses topics relevant to the linguistic and speech recognition communities. Using a database methodological approach, these studies detail new results on the effect of speakers' sex and dialect region on pronunciation.1 This report concerns speaker-dependent effects on certain phonetic characteristics of speech often involved in reduction such as speech rate, stop releases, flapping, central vowels, non-canonical phonation type, syllabic consonants, and palatalization processes.