A comparison of lexeme and speech syllables in Dutch

Abstract

The CELEX lexical database includes a list of Dutch syllables and their frequencies, based on syllabification of isolated word forms. In connected speech, however, sentence-level phonological rules can modify the syllables and their token frequencies. In order to estimate the changes syllables may undergo in connected speech, an empirical investigation was carried out. A large Dutch text corpus (TROUW) was transcribed, processed by word level rules, and syllabified. The resulting lexeme syllables were evaluated by comparing them to the CELEX lexical database for Dutch. Then additional phonological sentence-level rules were applied to the TROUW corpus, and the frequencies of the resulting connected speech syllables were compared with those of the lexeme syllables from TROUW. The overall correlation between lexeme and speech syllables was very high. However, speech syllables generally had more complex CV structures than lexeme syllables. Implications of the results for research involving syllables are discussed. With respect to the notion of a mental syllabary (a store for precompiled articulatory programs for syllables, see Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994) this study revealed an interesting statistical result. The calculation of the cumulative syllable frequencies showed that 85% of the syllable tokens in Dutch can be covered by the 500 most frequent syllable types, which makes the idea of a syllabary very attractive.

Effects of syllable frequency in speech production

“…In connected speech, as discussed above however, context-dependent phonological rules can modify the syllables and accordingly their token frequency. Schiller et al (1996) carried out an empirical investigation in order to estimate the changes syllables may undergo in connected speech. A large Dutch newspaper corpus (TROUW) was transcribed, word-level rules were applied and then syllabified.…”

“…6 In the inventories (CELEX and TROUW) the three most frequently occurring syllable types are, in order of frequency, CVV, CVC and CVVC, together accounting for more than 70% of all syllables. For more details and exact values of the two inventories, please see Schiller et al (1996).…”

“…The economic advantage of such a repository becomes apparent if one considers the computational load that would evolve when the single sub-syllabic or phonemic motor-patterns had to be computed anew each time in speech production. The above mentioned analyses by Schiller et al (1996) demonstrated that speakers re-use a rather small set of syllables over and over again, even for languages such as English, German or Dutch which have more than 12,000 different syllables. It would be efficient to store these over learned syllabic patterns and retrieve them as wholes, instead of computing them anew time and again as they appear during syllabification.…”

“…In fact, 500 syllables from English, Dutch, and German, i.e. less than 5% of the entire syllable inventory in those languages, suffice to produce approximately 80% of all speech in those languages (Schiller, Meyer, Baayen, & Levelt, 1996). To account for the easy and rapid production of these frequently occurring syllables, Levelt and Wheeldon (1994) proposed a repository of ready-made syllabic motor programs, called the Mental Syllabary.…”

Monitoring syllable boundaries during speech production

“…Syllables in the syllabary may possibly be represented in terms of gestural scores (Browman & Goldstein, 1992) specifying articulatory motor programs for syllable-sized chunks. Although there is very little on-line evidence for the use of syllables in speech production (Ferrand, Segui, & Grainger, 1996;Ferrand, Segui, & Humphreys, 1997;but see Brand, Rey, & Peereman, 2003;Schiller, 1998Schiller, , 2000Schiller, Costa, & Colome, 2002), the idea of having precompiled syllabic motor programs is very attractive because it decreases the computational load of the phonological/phonetic encoding component (Cholin, Schiller, & Levelt, 2004;Crompton, 1981;Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994; for lexico-statistical support see Schiller, Meyer, Baayen, & Levelt, 1996).…”