Schedule 72. StuTS

Many papers have repeatedly proven, that statistical properties, or probabilistic measures, of language affect the way we speak. Early mentions of frequency effects in language can be traced back to Arabic grammarians from the 8th century. This is a phenomenon called probabilistic reduction. It refers to redundancy-based effects that cause acoustic reduction. For example, high frequency words tend to be acoustically reduced compared to words with a low frequency, because low frequency words are less familiar and their acoustic information therefore less redundant. This behaviour has also been observed at the syllable and segment level. Aylett & Turk 2004 and Ennever et al. 2017 respectively showed that the probabilistic measures of syllables and segments influence their duration, and consequently also the duration of the word they are a part of. What is unclear, however, is what happens when different levels make conflicting predictions for the duration of a word. When, for example, high frequency of a word predicts a reduced duration, but its syllables have a low frequency. This results in a competition between the levels, where it is unclear whether a certain level has more predictive power than another for determining word duration.By using a computational model to represent lexical processes, I model this competition between the levels to see whether each 'level' of a word contributes equally to its duration (reduction), or if there are differences in how the word, its syllables and segments contribute to it.

Aylett, M., & Turk, A. (2004). The smooth signal redundancy hypothesis:
a functional explanation for relationships between redundancy, prosodic
prominence, and duration in spontaneous speech. Language and speech,
47 (Pt 1), 31–56. doi: 10.1177/00238309040470010201

Ennever, T., Meakins, F., & Round, E. R. (2017). A replicable acoustic mea-
sure of lenition and the nature of variability in gurindji stops. Laboratory
Phonology, 8 (1).

Info

Day: 2022-11-05
Start time: 14:45
Duration: 00:30
Room: Wiwi-Bunker —Room 5050
Track: Phonetics and Phonology
Language: en

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