Lexical frequency effects and phonetic duration of English homophones: An acoustic study

Cohn, Abigail C.; Brugman, J.; Crawford, Clifford; Joseph, Andrew

doi:10.1121/1.4785822

Cited by 10 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…In a corpus study of child-directed speech, Conwell (2017a) reported that adults differentiate homophone meanings as a function of frequency when speaking to children, but only in utterance-final positions, which is consistent with the findings from Cohn and colleagues (2005). Additionally, Conwell (2017a) found that higher frequency homophone meanings in child-directed speech had higher mean pitch than their lower frequency counterparts.…”

supporting

confidence: 69%

Token Frequency Effects in Homophone Production: An Elicitation Study

Conwell

2017

Lang Speech

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In natural production, adults differentiate homophones prosodically as a function of the frequency of their intended meaning. This study compares adult and child productions of homophones to determine whether prosodic differentiation of homophones changes over development. Using a picture-based story-completion paradigm, isolated tokens of homophones were elicited from English-learning children and adult native English speakers. These tokens were measured for duration, vowel duration, pitch, pitch range and vowel quality. Results indicate that less frequent meanings of homophones are longer in duration than their more frequent counterparts in both adults and children. No other measurement differed as a function of meaning frequency. Because speakers of all ages produce longer tokens of lower frequency homophones, homophone differentiation does not change over development, but is included in children’s early lexicons. These findings indicate that production planning processes alone may not fully account for differences in homophone duration, but rather that the differences could be learned and represented from experience even in early stages of lexical acquisition.

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supporting

confidence: 69%

Token Frequency Effects in Homophone Production: An Elicitation Study

Conwell

2017

Lang Speech

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“…While most previous studies do not disclose all homophone pairs analyzed (Whalen 1991, Guion 1995, Cohn et al. 2005, Gahl 2008, 2009), judging from the examples that are discussed, the homophones analyzed were homonyms, i.e. unrelated semantically, e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Guion (1995) reports a similar positive finding for homophones embedded in constructed sentences, but a negative finding when the words were pronounced in citation form in generic carrier phrases. Cohn et al (2005) fail to find an effect of lemma frequency on duration, testing the pronunciation of homophones both in constructed sentences and also read off lists. All of the experimental studies tested heterographic homophones.…”

Section: The Present Study In the Context Of Previous Research About mentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Cohn et al. (2005) fail to find an effect of lemma frequency on duration, testing the pronunciation of homophones both in constructed sentences and also read off lists. All of the experimental studies tested heterographic homophones.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These were content words in the case of Guion (1995) and Cohn et al. (2005). Whalen (1991) tested a mix of content and function words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Cut(n) andcut(v) are not homophones: Lemma frequency affects the duration of noun–verb conversion pairs

Lohmann

2017

J. Ling.

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This paper tests whether lemma frequency impacts the duration of homographic noun–verb homophones in spontaneous speech, e.g. cut (n)/cut (v). In earlier research on effects of lemma frequency (e.g. Gahl 2008), these pairs of words were not investigated due to a focus on heterographic homophones. Theories of the mental lexicon in both linguistics and psycholinguistics differ as to whether these word pairs are assumed to have shared or separate lexical representations. An empirical analysis based on spontaneous speech from the Buckeye corpus (Pitt et al. 2007) yields the result that differences in lemma frequency affect the duration of the N/V pairs under investigation. First, this finding provides evidence for N/V pairs having separate representations and thus supports models of the mental lexicon in which lexical entries are specified for word class. Second, the result is at odds with an account of ‘full inheritance’ of frequency across homophones and consequently with speech production models implementing inheritance effects via a shared form representation for homophonous words. The findings are best accounted for in a model that assumes completely separate lexical representations for homophonous words.

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The duration of word-final s in English: A comparison of regular-plural and pluralia-tantum nouns

Schlechtweg

Corbett

2021

Morphology

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The alveolar fricative occurs in word-final position in English in different grammatical functions. Nominal suffixes may indicate plurality (e.g. cars), genitive case (e.g. car’s) or plurality and genitive case in cumulation (e.g. cars’). Further, there are the third person singular verbal suffix (e.g. she fears) and the cliticized forms of the third person singular forms of have and be (e.g. she’s been lucky; she’s friendly). There is also non-affixal s (e.g. freeze (noun)). Against the standard view that all these types are homophonous, several empirical studies have shown that at least some of the fricatives listed can actually be differentiated in their duration. The present article expands this line of research and considers a further case, which has not been included in previous analyses: pluralia-tantum nouns (e.g. goggles). We report on a carefully controlled reading study in which native speakers of British English produced pluralia-tantum and comparable regular-plural nouns (e.g. toggles). The duration of the word-final fricative was measured, and it was found that the two do not systematically differ in this acoustic parameter. The new data are interpreted in comparison to relevant previous studies, and against the background of the similarities of pluralia-tantum and regular-plural nouns.

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Lexical frequency effects and phonetic duration of English homophones: An acoustic study

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Token Frequency Effects in Homophone Production: An Elicitation Study

Token Frequency Effects in Homophone Production: An Elicitation Study

Cut(n) andcut(v) are not homophones: Lemma frequency affects the duration of noun–verb conversion pairs

The duration of word-final s in English: A comparison of regular-plural and pluralia-tantum nouns

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