More than Words: The Effect of Multi-word Frequency and Constituency on Phonetic Duration

Abstract

There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to the distributional properties of multi-word sequences. Such findings expand the range of information speakers are sensitive to and call for processing models that can represent larger chains of relations. In the current paper we investigate the effect of multi-word statistics on phonetic duration using a combination of experimental and corpus-based research. We ask (a) if phonetic duration is affected by multi-word frequency in both elicited and spontaneous speech, and (b) if syntactic constituency modulates the effect. We show that phonetic durations are reduced in higher frequency sequences, regardless of constituency: duration is shorter for more frequent sequences within and across syntactic boundaries. The effects are not reducible to the frequency of the individual words or substrings. These findings open up a novel set of questions about the interaction between surface distributions and higher order properties, and the resulting need (or lack thereof) to incorporate higher order properties into processing models.

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

“…The line of research on phonetics-lexicon interactions is important to acknowledge, as it potentially offers a way of reconciling apparently non-modular effects with a modular analysis. We know that lexical factors, such as neighbourhood size, frequency, or lexical predictability, influence continuous phonetic dimensions, such as for instance VOT, segmental duration, or degree of coarticulation (Munson & Solomon, 2004;Scarborough, 2004;Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009;Arnon & Cohen Priva, 2013;Cohen Priva, 2015). These findings have not led to a unanimous rejection of modular processing, as some psycholinguistic models have the capacity to capture such gradient phonetic effects using simultaneous activation of multiple categories.…”

N-gram probability effects in a cloze task

“…Sprenger and van Rijn (2013) replicated this effect in the production of Dutch expressions for time. Arnon and Cohen Priva (2013) found reduced phonetic durations for higher frequency n-grams and Shaoul, Westbury, and found evidence for n-gram probability effects in subjective frequency tasks 1 .…”

Formulaic Sequences and the Implications for Second Language Learning

“…(e.g. Arnon & Priva, 2013;Arnon & Snider, 2010;Tremblay, Derwing, Libben, & Westbury, 2011). Frequency effect on the comprehension and production of formulaic sequences has been detected in L1 research, but little research has explored online processing of formulaic sequences except for idioms in L2.…”