Inflected words in production: Evidence for a morphologically rich lexicon

Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Effects in Estonian Spontaneous Speech

Recent evidence indicates that a word's paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, these findings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thus ignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present in spontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on English, we focus on the duration of inflected and uninflected word-final /-s/ in content words, while simultaneously investigating whole words. Our analyses reveal three points. First, we find an effect of realized inflectional paradigm size, such that smaller paradigms actively used by the speakers lead to longer durations. Second, higher conditional probability is associated with shorter word forms and shorter segments. Finally, we do not directly replicate previous work on effects of inflectional status as in English word-final /-s/. Instead, we find that inflectional status interacts with conditional probability. We discuss the results in light of models of speech production and how they account for morphologically complex words and their paradigmatic neighbors.

The duration of word-final /s/ differs across morphological categories in English: evidence from pseudowords

Previous research suggests that different types of word-final /s/ and /z/ (e.g. non-morphemic vs. plural or clitic morpheme) in English show realisational differences in duration. However, there is disagreement on the nature of these differences, as experimental studies have provided evidence for durational differences of the opposite direction as results from corpus studies (i.e. non-morphemic > plural > clitic /s/). The experimental study reported here focuses on four types of word-final /s/ in English, i.e. non-morphemic, plural, and is- and has-clitic /s/. We conducted a pseudoword production study with native speakers of Southern British English. The results show that non-morphemic /s/ is significantly longer than plural /s/, which in turn is longer than clitic /s/, while there is no durational difference between the two clitics. This aligns with previous corpus rather than experimental studies. Thus, the morphological category of a word-final /s/ appears to be a robust predictor for its phonetic realisation influencing speech production in such a way that systematic subphonemic differences arise. This finding calls for revisions of current models of speech production in which morphology plays no role in later stages of production.

Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Speech Production: Modeling the Acoustic Duration of English Derived Words With Linear Discriminative Learning

Recent evidence for the influence of morphological structure on the phonetic output goes unexplained by established models of speech production and by theories of the morphology-phonology interaction. Linear discriminative learning (LDL) is a recent computational approach in which such effects can be expected. We predict the acoustic duration of 4,530 English derivative tokens with the morphological functions DIS, NESS, LESS, ATION, and IZE in natural speech data by using predictors derived from a linear discriminative learning network. We find that the network is accurate in learning speech production and comprehension, and that the measures derived from it are successful in predicting duration. For example, words are lengthened when the semantic support of the word's predicted articulatory path is stronger. Importantly, differences between morphological categories emerge naturally from the network, even when no morphological information is provided. The results imply that morphological effects on duration can be explained without postulating theoretical units like the morpheme, and they provide further evidence that LDL is a promising alternative for modeling speech production.

Durational Differences of Word-Final /s/ Emerge From the Lexicon: Modelling Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Pseudowords With Linear Discriminative Learning

Recent research has shown that seemingly identical suffixes such as word-final /s/ in English show systematic differences in their phonetic realisations. Most recently, durational differences between different types of /s/ have been found to also hold for pseudowords: the duration of /s/ is longest in non-morphemic contexts, shorter with suffixes, and shortest in clitics. At the theoretical level such systematic differences are unexpected and unaccounted for in current theories of speech production. Following a recent approach, we implemented a linear discriminative learning network trained on real word data in order to predict the duration of word-final non-morphemic and plural /s/ in pseudowords using production data by a previous production study. It is demonstrated that the duration of word-final /s/ in pseudowords can be predicted by LDL networks trained on real word data. That is, duration of word-final /s/ in pseudowords can be predicted based on their relations to the lexicon.

Contextual predictability influences word and morpheme duration in a morphologically complex language (Kaqchikel Mayan)

The probability is one of the many factors which influence phonetic variation. Contextual probability, which describes how predictable a linguistic unit is in some local environment, has been consistently shown to modulate the phonetic salience of words and other linguistic units in speech production (the probabilistic reduction effect). In this paper the question of whether the probabilistic reduction effect, as previously observed for majority languages like English, is also found in a language (Kaqchikel Mayan) which has relatively rich morphology is explored. Specifically, whether the contextual predictability of words and morphemes influences their phonetic duration in Kaqchikel is examined. It is found that the contextual predictability of a word has a significant effect on its duration. The effect is manifested differently for lexical words and function words. It is also found that the contextual predictability of certain prefixes in Kaqchikel affects their duration, showing that contextual predictability may drive reduction effects at multiple levels of structure. While the findings are broadly consistent with many previous studies (primarily on English), some of the details of the results are different. These differences highlight the importance of examining the probabilistic reduction effect in languages beyond the majority, Indo-European languages most commonly investigated in experimental and corpus linguistics.

Variation in the speech signal as a window into the cognitive architecture of language production

The pronunciation of words is highly variable. This variation provides crucial information about the cognitive architecture of the language production system. This review summarizes key empirical findings about variation phenomena, integrating corpus, acoustic, articulatory, and chronometric data from phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. It examines how these data constrain our current understanding of word production processes and highlights major challenges and open issues that should be addressed in future research.

ASL-LEX: A lexical database of American Sign Language

ASL-LEX is a lexical database that catalogues information about nearly 1,000 signs in American Sign Language (ASL). It includes the following information: subjective frequency ratings from 25-31 deaf signers, iconicity ratings from 21-37 hearing non-signers, videoclip duration, sign length (onset and offset), grammatical class, and whether the sign is initialized, a fingerspelled loan sign, or a compound. Information about English translations is available for a subset of signs (e.g., alternate translations, translation consistency). In addition, phonological properties (sign type, selected fingers, flexion, major and minor location, and movement) were coded and used to generate sub-lexical frequency and neighborhood density estimates. ASL-LEX is intended for use by researchers, educators, and students who are interested in the properties of the ASL lexicon. An interactive website where the database can be browsed and downloaded is available at http://asl-lex.org .

Dimensions of similarity in the mental lexicon

During language production planning, multiple candidate representations are implicitly activated prior to articulation. Lexical representations that are phonologically related to the target (phonological neighbors) are known to influence phonetic properties of the target word. However, the question of which dimensions of phonological similarity contribute to such lexical-phonetic effects remains unanswered. In the present study, we reanalyze phonetic data from a previous study, examining the contrasting predictions of different definitions of phonological similarity. Our results suggest that similarity at the level of position-specific phonological segments best predicts the influence of neighbor activation on phonetic properties of initial consonants.